Siddharth Rao’s Blog

Notions of a Creative Tech Geek, with a Personal Touch!

Pay-Per-Click Search Engines Review (Part-2)

Greetings from Siddharth Rao’s Blog! Following up on my last week’s post on PPC Search Engines Review – Part 1, this post is the second installment of the same.

In the world of Pay-Per-Click advertising, search engines are broadly classified into two tiers. The tier-1 search engines are the most famous ones and supposedly the ones where over 95% of the Internet traffic comes from. The top three tier-1 search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN (or Live). Thereby, their respective PPC advertising programs happen to be the top three tier-1 search engines where one should consider advertising their products or services online:

1. Google Adwords (Visit Site)
2. Yahoo Search Marketing (Visit Site)
3. MSN Adcenter (Visit Site)

Google Adwords:
Adwords is a biggest advertising program, has huge traffic volume (you need to have a good amount of money before you get your hands down with Google), pretty good traffic quality and an excellent user interface. It only takes $5 to sign up and get started. However, you need to have a decent advertising budget, as you will get plenty of clicks on the very next day you start your campaign! Adwords is the topmost ranked online advertising program out there in the Internet world. It has over 70% of the Internet users traffic share and millions of other publishers / web site owners in their “content network”. I’ll explain the content network later in this post.

Yahoo Search Marketing:
Originally, the advertising program of Yahoo was run by goto.com – which later got acquired by “Overture” – and now everything is a part of Yahoo with the name Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM). Yahoo is the second largest advertising program. It has about 20% of the Internet users traffic share and a decent content network as well. The traffic quality of YSM is also good (although it depends on what you are advertising) and the biggest advantage of Yahoo over Google is cheaper click costs. Since the competition is more on Google, the click costs are higher. Also, Yahoo is far more lenient in terms of rules laid down for ad text, web site standards, landing page quality, etc.

Also, Yahoo offers a $100 coupon in free advertising credit. Use this link to register and claim this promotional coupon. (Note - coupon will be posted in a couple of days)

MSN Adcenter:
This one is a relatively newer program but apparently from a BIG player – Microsoft. Although they only have about 5% of the total Internet users traffic share, it is indeed promising and arguably offers best conversions / returns for your advertising budget. They have a decent content network as well with several other web-based services that they offer as well as their “hotmail” /other email programs. They have a good keyword research tool as well. And finally – they have the least competition. I can’t understand why most of the publishers don’t advertise on MSN. But that just means there’s some dirt cheap online advertising up for the taking : - )

Besides the above tier-1 search engines (which account for over 95% of the Internet traffic) – there are a several smaller search engines under the tier-2 roof. While most of them are almost useless in my opinion, there are a few ones, which are reasonably decent. Following are some of the tier-2 PPC search engines / networks:

• MIVA
• 7Search
• Marchex Adhere
• SearchFeed
• Bidvertiser

I would not say that they are good places to advertise or you will achieve great traffic / ROI (return on investment) off these tier-2 search engines – since I have not invested significantly or tried all of these for extended periods. However, I have read about some people getting decent results out of their advertising efforts on these search engines. I think it depends on what kind of traffic you are seeking for your web site / business. If you are essentially selling a product or a service / membership, then I would not recommend any tier-2 search engines. They are a complete waste. On the contrary – if you are providing some free service or just capturing emails for leads; then it might be worth a try.

To round things up and get a clear understanding, you have to know the main difference between tier-1 and tier-2 search engines. Tier-2 search engines are essentially not search engines – but a traffic sourcing network; using various channels and mediums. Tier-1 search engines have traffic sources in the form of a “search network” and “content network”. Search network means the users who use the search engine and perform a search; and ads relevant to that keyword displays on the top and on the right side of the search results page. Content network means those other web sites who display ads on their pages.

For example, Google has an advertising program for web site owners / publishers by the name: Google Adsense. Using that – one can display ads on his/her web site / pages and they can earn a share of money when someone clicks on it. As an advertiser, you get an option to display your ads on these sites from the “Google content network”. There are several other channels which are included under the Google content network, like ads inside your email interface for Gmail, other free Google services like Orkut, Youtube, etc. This can be very useful and can get a lot of volume of traffic – if you do your campaign homework well. It is extremely important that you understand where and why to advertise before you dive in - otherwise, it does not take long to loose your shirt!

In my experience, I have been primarily using all the tier-1 advertising programs – and I have to say, Google just outranks everyone else! That’s where most of the traffic is and that’s the strictest program out there. There’s a whole world of rules, which can take several blog posts to explain, and it is out of scope for this post. Just be sure to do your research online before jumping into anything. Having said that – I like Yahoo and MSN programs as well; especially because they have relaxed rules, lesser competition (thus more traffic in the same budget) and a good user base.

So that wraps up this specific topic and post. If you have a web site (or plan to build one) where you offer a service or a product (of your own or someone else’s) – you have to engage in the world of PPC advertising. There’s indeed a steep learning curve involved but there’s loads of money to be made if you do your thing right. The sky is the limit. If you need to know the specifics, just use Google Search to find tons of free resources for educating yourself and get started. And hey – I’m not making a theoretical statement here. I’ve been actively playing my game in this world and successfully making my share of profits in it – each day! : - )

That’s it people! My next post is probably going to be something for the “ranting” category..lol.. I’d also try to put up some more juicy deals and coupons up for the grabs; and then try to complete my post on logo designing – which I was supposed to do a couple months ago.

Pay-Per-Click Search Engines Review (Part-1)

Hello Everyone! This blog post is more like a PPC-SEM-101 article. I mean Pay-Per-Click Search-Engine-Marketing 101 course or a simple article. So if you are an intermediate affiliate marketer or someone who already knows the basics of PPC search marketing, this post is not for you. Following the introduction and basic information, I’ll list the tier-1 top three search engines and their success with their respective PPC programs. I’ll also list a few tier-2 PPC search engines/programs that I know about.

We all know what is a search engine and what is it used for: to search for what we want and get results (web sites) that contain pages/content related to your search term (keyword). When you type something in the search box on any search engine and hit return, you get search results. For example, I’ve attached a screen shot of a search on Google below:

This search results page (on most of the search engines) is divided in to three parts. The top three sponsored listings, the right side sponsored listings, and the remainder of the 10 listings below the top-3 listings. I’ve highlighted the two areas of sponsored listings. The third area is called “organic results / listings”. The ads/listings appearing in the highlighted areas are paid advertisements relevant to your search term / keyword. The owners of those respective web sites bid for paid placements on certain keywords and they pay a variable cost every time someone clicks on their ad and reaches their page.

The cost of each click is variable since it depends on several conditions / factors. Here are some of the most important factors that can influence your CPC (cost per click):

• Advertiser competition for that keyword (how many other advertisers are bidding for the same keyword)
• Landing page Quality Score (a metric used to calculate the quality of your landing page where the visitor lands after clicking on the ad). There are several factors that influence your Quality Score and I’ll be making a separate post on it later.
• Ad position: Your CPC will vary depending on your ad position. However, there are multiple things that influence your ad position, like ad text relevance with respect to the keyword, ad quality, landing page quality score, bounce rate on landing page, etc. The better points are on the above factors, the higher you’ll rank in the ad positions and at the same time, the search engine will charge you much lesser then some other advertisers. So basically, search engines will charge you lesser and put you on the top of all ads, if your visitors really like your content on your web site / landing page.

The organic results / listings are non-paid natural search results. Ranking in the top-10 organic results for any keyword is far more competitive compared to paid-search results, especially for shorter/broader competitive keywords. Also, your site needs to have a decent history online and a reputation (back links from good/green sites) to rank high in organic results. Besides that, there’s a whole world of what we call “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) – which involves several techniques and work for building your site’s reputation, increasing relevancy and ranking in the top-10 organic results for specific set of keywords.

The paid search results / listings are usually occupied by those web sites / businesses – which are:

• Not yet in the top-10 organic results for that keyword(s)
• Have a relatively new site / business / product line / service
• In the process of building their brand or creating a buzz about their brand / product / service
• Testing specialized landing pages with certain high-competitive keywords
• Affiliates marketers (promoting products or services of merchants)
• Businesses trying to collect leads in the form of email addresses and/or other personal information like phone numbers, addresses, etc. for other business activities like email promotions, sales calls, etc.

There are several strategies when it comes to PPC advertising and I will be making many blog posts on those topics / strategies in the future. For the purpose of this blog post – I will be writing about the basics and not the advanced topics.

I will list the search engines (tier-1 and tier-2) in my next blog post (part-2) and review them briefly. However, before I close in – I wanted to point out a common careless mistake that most of the Internet users do. Many users of any search engines usually click on the sponsored advertisements several times, use the back button, again click on it, and click on the next ad, etc. – without any thought or care of knowing if they are sponsored ads or natural/organic listings.

I know you would ask, “Why the hell should I care” ?!? Well, it’s just about asking yourself – if you were an entrepreneur or a business owner; and if you were having your ads showing up on a search engine’s sponsored ad section – would you like anyone else clicking all the way on it knowing that you have to pay for each click? The same is the case with any other advertiser. It is okay to click on an ad if you are interested in what the ad / web site has to offer. However, just spend that split of a second thinking that if you have to behave like a responsible citizen in the Internet world; you just have to think before click-away-to-glory – on all of the sponsored ads out there.

That’s it from Siddharth Rao’s Blog for now! I’ll be doing a part-2 of this post; by next week. So stay tuned and I hope you enjoyed this post.

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Google Adwords Jumpstart Review

Greetings from Siddharth Rao’s blog! While I’m still trying to catch up with all the backlog of work I’ve managed to pile up (thanks to my 5-week India vacation) – it looks like my blog has been spotted by a few BIGTIME spammers! The “Lead Evolution Review” post that I did a couple of months ago seem to have been added to some automated blog-commenting software – being used by several “grey-hat” and “black-hat” search engine optimization people/companies. I get an average of about 70 spam comments each day – most of them being link-backs to those weight-loss/acai berry scam sites, porn sites or some freaking stupid site with tags like “swine flu”, etc. I think it’s about time I have to look into some good semi-automated spam filters for Wordpress.

Anyway, today I’m going to write a detailed review about the “Google Jumpstart” program – which I participated a few months ago. I had mentioned about getting a call from Google™ recommending the “Jumpstart” program in a blog post that I made in November 2008. It’s now time to write a detailed review about this program. FYI - Google™ has disabled any direct links to this program information page and they only choose advertisers manually on some criteria; and contact them asking if they will be interested in participating their program.

I enrolled in this program and Google™ assigned a dedicated account manager for me. I was given direct access to this point of contact via email or phone. The main job of this account manager was to help me analyze my site, take my input on what areas / products / pages of my site am I trying to get most of the traffic and then research to find out how to use the Google™ Adwords™ program to strategically bid on keywords that can get highly targeted traffic to these pages and help me achieve my “conversion goals”. Conversion goals means the percentage of visitors to my site who convert into potential “customers” for products/services offered by my partner merchants/retail merchants listed on my site.

Yes – for those who understand what this means, it does sound like “WOW”. However, after participating in it and putting close to $2000 as test money into the program, I’ve had mixed results. I’m going to list the points that I observed as a part of my experience in a bulleted form and provide my review on it.

1. Interaction / communication: The Jumpstart team and the personnel at Google™ are very good at interacting and communicating business needs and goals with their clients. I recall having two weekly meetings, constant follow-up via email, seeking feedback and acting on the feedback provided.
2. Main focus & Deficiency: As per my experience, I found out that there was an offset in focus as far as business goals are concerned – which was the main reason why I or my site did not have a high success rate with this program. I personally feel that Google™ focuses on getting more “clicks” rather then getting “higher targeted convertible clicks”. Often, the searches performed by Internet users or visitors are classified into three types: “Browse”, “Compare” and “Buy”. Based on these three types, we can roughly estimate the mindset and the stage in which this user is trying to seek information. People in the browse stage will use very broad search terms because they just want to get first-hand information on a particular product or service. On the contrary, a person who is ready to buy a product will search a much targeted keyword string with the brand, model number/name and with words like “purchase” in the search string. Obviously, the number of searches occurring in the “buy” stage will be much lesser compared to “Browse” and “Compare” type searches. Having said that, lesser the search – lesser the number of clicks we would get if we bid on that keyword for displaying our ad on Google™. Now as a site owner I would indeed be more concerned and interested to raise my conversion ratio rather then just getting non-targeted traffic. However, Google™ does concentrate on getting more “clicks” for obvious reasons. More clicks means more money to them. There were several instances where I had to try out a bunch of “compare” and even “browse” type keywords suggested by them for a few weeks; only to see that those keywords were just attracting clicks and costing me money but were not “converting” into customers at all. Eventually, I had to get back to my Account Manager and ask them to stop bidding on those keywords.
3. Strengths / Positive Points: There were several benefits that I got by participating in this program. First of all, I could have a direct point of contact to call or email asking questions about so many Adwords™ related topics – which were vague and not clearly answered on most of the forums, Adwords™ Help Site, etc. So I had access to authentic and real information FAST. That was the biggest plus of this program. Secondly, I got to know some very important points about landing page “quality score”, ad writing “best practices”, so smart tips on using Google™ Adwords™ “Keyword Tool” for advanced keyword research, etc. I learnt a lot about using the Google™ Content Network and targeted placements for advertising image ads and getting reasonable qualified traffic from those channels. I also got an opportunity to be a member of the “Adwords™ Business Council” which allows me to be one of the first set of beta-testers and reviewers of new tools and features being developed by the Adwords™ Development Team.
4. Conclusion: After using this program for almost 4+ months, I would say that I am reasonably satisfied with the results that I got out of it. Although I did not make huge profits or anything of that sort, I indeed learnt quite a few interesting things, which I can now apply and improve my advertising campaign results in terms of customer reach and profitability. So I will definitely recommend this program to anyone who has a mid-level to large web site or portal, which either sells products/services directly (ecommerce) or simply runs a large affiliate business involving several retail/brand merchants and their respective products / services.

That’s my 2-cents on the Google™ Jumpstart Program. Anyone who has similar or contrasting views is free to comment on this blog (except spammers). And here’s a sneak-peak on what’s lined up for the next 2-3 months:

• More blog posts per month – I’m planning to test out the user interest and possible growth in traffic by increasing the frequency of posts on this blog.
• Start working on the re-launch of the “new Sidlogic.com” – I’ve shut this site down as I have plans to revamp it and get it out there as a completely different web 2.0 ecommerce site.
• Expand my existing range of sites and increase sales. The market is slowly picking up and recovering from the massive recession and it’s time to target those pockets who are loosening up to spend some money and buy stuff online : - )

I’m back from vacation…

Hello everyone! I just wanted to do a quick post to let you all know that I am back from vacation. I had been to India for a five-week vacation. It was a nice break and everything was great (except for the hot weather and soaring high temperatures). The best feature of the trip was that I enjoyed the great Alphanso Mangoes from Ratnagiri - after five long years.

Anyway, I’m back to Boston now and I will make a detailed post on an interesting topic next week. Spring is upon us and I’m sure everyone is looking forward to a great summer - just like me : - ) — That’s it for now, stay tuned for my next post!

Excellent Free Fonts Resource & Updates

Greetings from Siddharth Rao’s blog! I have two incomplete posts sitting on my laptop hard-drive that were supposed to be posted here. However, they never made it because I couldn’t complete them. One of them was about how I managed to break the front LCD screen of my iPhone 3G and then how I went about fixing it. But then I got too involved into the iPhone 3G world, playing with it, trying new things with the iPhone SDK, applications, etc. All I can say is that it’s a super-cool, powerful but delicate gadget! I am hoping to be selling some applications in the Apple store myself, in the months to come ahead. So all you iPhone users – stay tuned and soon you’ll see my app ready for download at the store! : - )

The second post was a mini tutorial on how to use Photoshop (or GIMP) with some free fonts to create stunning logos and graphical text effects. I plan on completing the second one in a few days and post it on my blog later. Anyway, I am on vacation starting this weekend for the next five weeks! : - ) – So I think I can spend some more time on write quality posts for my blog.

I wanted to share a great {FREE} resource for fonts: www.fawnt.com - I stumbled upon this site a few weeks ago and I’ve already used some of the fonts to make some cool logos. For anyone who know how to play around with Photoshop or Gimp to a reasonable level, you can do wonders with it. For anyone who wants a business angle – think about make 3-4 cool logos and add it to your portfolio/resume. Then go and register on any one of the many freelance sites out there. A couple of examples are: Rent-A-Coder and eLance.com. Bid on logo design projects which you feel comfortable with. If you do your stuff right – you could be making anywhere from $25 - $200 for each logo that you design – using the free resources. For those who don’t know – GIMP is a completely free (open-source) graphic editing software, which can do many things like Photoshop. Think about 4-5 logo designs a month for an average of $100 per design – that’s a cool $500 for a few hours of creative playing with free tools. I’ll try to show some screen shots when I post the logo design tutorial on how easy this can be!

Also, I’ve received a few comments for my previous post on “Lead Evolution Review”. A couple of comments we from one of the founders (Brian Koz). I have not approved his comments because I could see the same sales pitch in his comment/response. I didn’t want him to advertise his software on my blog (at least). I hope that answers your question Brian. I always maintained that your software might work for many people. However, there are some people who just won’t find it useful – at all. I was one of them and I am sure there are going to be some more. Not every customer will be satisfied – it is the nature of the software industry. That said, I wish you (and Dr. Mike) good luck with your software promotions and may your business grow.

Lead Evolution Review 2010

Greetings to everyone from Siddharth Rao’s Blog! Today, I’m going to write a detailed unbiased real review of highly priced software called “Lead Evolution” – developed (and marketed) by Dr. Mike Woo-Ming & Brian Koz. UPDATE: The review still holds TRUE for 2010, so updating the title!

First of all, for those who have no idea what I am talking about – Lead Evolution is a software used to generate “leads” in the form of email addresses of prospective people looking for something on the internet. There are free community web sites like craigslist.org, kijiji.com, backpage.com, etc. where you can go and post a classified ad under “Wanted” or “Looking for” category and post what you are looking for. Other people can then see your posting and if they have something similar to sell at the price you are asking for; they can contact you and you both can negotiate and see if you get what you need.

Anyway, Dr. Mike Woo-Ming and Brian Koz – developed a software that basically allows you to type a niche or a category related keyword/phrase and searches the above mentioned free sites for listings that contain your keyword/phrase – from the respective categories. Then you need to manually read through each of the posting to see if it is relevant to what you are trying to sell. After that – the software has an interface where you can send an email to this person who created the posting and hope that s/he responds back to go one step further towards a possibility of a sale or consideration of a valid business lead – for whatever you are trying to sell.

If you have been using the Internet for a few years and have been disgusted by what we call “SPAM” – you should immediately be thinking that hey, wait a minute – doesn’t this appear to be a systematic way of spamming people? Well, sure indeed! However, the founders of Lead Evolution boast of having a great legal team and affirm that we are only sending solicited email to people who asked for information themselves and the email which we send them is relevant to their posting – Whatever!

Okay – now lets talk about why I am writing this on my blog. I attended a webinar by Dr. Mike & Brian Koz about a month ago. It was a 2-hour webinar where these guys presented about this software (hiding the source of searching leads) and tried to sell it to us by throwing a lifetime support / upgrade packages, etc. etc. I have to say that they are pretty good at selling the software – since they were presenting it very well. However, the software does not even stick to 20% of the potential that they are trying to portray / market! After the webinar – I bought this software and decided to try it out for a couple of weeks or so. They had a 30-day money back guarantee, which motivated me to give it a shot and see if it does what they say it can do.

Now comes the real strike – “Lead Evolution Cost” or “Lead Evolution Price Tag”! The cost of this software is a whooping USD 4491 – to be paid in 3 monthly installments. Alternately – if you pay everything upfront at the time of buying the software license, they give you a discount of $494. So the cost comes down to USD 3997 – if paid in full. Now that is way costlier then some of the “elite” software suites; being provided by software giants out there. One would imagine – either Lead Evolution has to be something revolutionary to justify the cost or something plain stupid, designed to loot people in the name of “hope” of getting business leads in record time.

Unfortunately – the latter is true, in my opinion!

The software is extremely slow when it comes to sending emails to these prospective leads. Moreover, the moment you send over 10 emails, most email clients will flag it as SPAM and not even let it reach these people’s inbox. The software encourages of creating multiple email accounts to trick getting into the SPAM folder of prospective leads – and claims it to be legitimate enough, which “I just can’t understand”!

Typically, it took me 7 hours to search about 100 leads for a specific niche and send 100 emails to promote a product that they were looking for. In return – I find that more then half of them made it to the SPAM folder. Only 50% made it to the inbox. Six of them actually replied back with interest and indent to buy the product. Only 1 of them actually bought the product from me!

Now that is a 1% conversation rate for 7 hours of mechanical donkeywork? And now comes the best part – while claiming my refund, the founders say “think outside the box Sid”! Wow! I tested out 5 other diverse niches and markets and find out that the conversions was less then 1% for those niches. That was it! I decided that I’ve wasted enough time of a piece of crap and it’s time to go and claim my refund.

Now comes the opportunity to deal with their great support team! They have a ticketing system where I had to open a help ticket requesting a refund. The whole support system operates of spammy-looking gmail addresses. I had to communicate back and forth with at least three people from the support team – who responded with a different gmail address every time I updated my ticket.

Long story short – Lead Evolution Sucks Big Time – in my opinion! With a price tag of $4491 and a function of essentially harvesting email address off free sites like craigslist.org, kijiji.com and backpage.com – it is a complete waste of money and it just does not make any sense. On top of everything – the amount of time required to actually use this software to find and convert leads is far more then some of the smart internet marketing techniques already out there.

Finally, all the functionality of this software is available for FREE by another service online at: CraigsHelper.com. They already have craigslist and ebay search integrated. They are working on backpage and kijiji as well. So why the hell would one pay $4491 for the exact same functionality?

There might be some people who are finding Lead Evolution useful to make a few hundred (or thousand) dollars out there. However, I feel that I’m better off making tens of thousands of dollars using legitimate but harder ways of internet marketing & online advertising – rather then using a potential white-hat-spam-software and looking for so called “smart” way of finding leads.

Any Internet marketers out there visiting my blog for the first time and have a different or similar opinion about Lead Evolution, please feel free to leave a comment on this post!

Belated New Year Wishes & Q1-2009 Roadmap

First of all, a super-belated “Happy New Year 2009” to all readers of Siddharth Rao’s Blog! It has been over a month since my last post. I’ve been stuck with a long backlog of pending work, which was taking all my time. In addition, with the holiday season in December and New Year, I had lot of updates going in for my web sites as well.

Anyway, I’ll be more regular on my blog – going forward. I should be posting at least twice a month, that’s my aim. I am behind schedule and haven’t completed writing the Joomla tutorials as yet. I’ll probably start rolling them out from next month or so.

Also, I recently bought the most expensive software I’ve ever purchased so far! It goes by the name of “LeadEvolution” and it is primarily designed to collect prospective business leads online that are asking for products/services, which they couldn’t find or get. I’ve been testing it since the last two days and I have not found it to be anything great or even nearly worth its price tag. I will be completely testing it for one more week or so and I’ll post a very detailed review on it.

Besides that – I have a couple of small projects lined up to be started this quarter. I’d be calling upon some of the guys I know to help me out and partner with me in these projects. Keep a look out for the same in the following blog posts!

In the mean while – here is a quick pick on this week’s “off-the-topic” hot list. Check out this article: http://www.whec.com/article/stories/S757511.shtml?cat=565

As a result of a class action lawsuit on these renowned departmental stores, they are giving away free stuff till 27th January 2009. If you’ve taken time to read out the above article, it’s time to spend a couple of our this weekend at one of those stores and grab some free goodies – while they last! : - )

Global Economy Continues to Weaken – Consider Investing in “Online” Properties

Greetings from Siddharth Rao’s blog! As we get closer to Christmas and the end of year 2008, people in the US are still fighting to keep their jobs. “Layoffs” is latest buzzword around everyone out there. The economy continues to weaken and the following year 2009 does not appear to be very promising (at least the first two quarters).

Like I said in my previous blog post – the Internet world is not seeing any “recession”. A lot of people are actively considering the option to take up the learning curve; and invest their time (as well as money) towards a “virtual real-estate”. If you ever wanted to build a web site around anything – now is the best time to do it.

For someone who has no idea about it – building/developing a web site can be like stepping in a land of crowded people who don’t talk/understand your language. I have received many requests from my friends in the recent weeks; to help them build their web site. So, I would be dedicating a series of next few blogs towards systematic step-by-step tutorials – for building a simple yet advanced web site from scratch.

The perfect audience would be those who have some technical/computer background and understand the basics of the Internet world. Someone who just learnt how to send emails a few weeks ago - are out of scope for these tutorials.

There are hundreds of tools and utilities attached with respective technologies, which one can use – when considering to build a web site. For a newbie – this can be way too overwhelming. In my posts – I would be using/showing one specific way, of making a web site (using a set of tools/technologies); which I believe is simple yet powerful; and highly efficient.

Most of the tools and technologies that I would use and recommend are from the open-source community (and hence, free)! In my next blog post – I’ll start out by giving an introduction of an advanced “Content Management System” (CMS) called “Joomla”. You would be using Joomla as your framework and foundation – for your web site project.

So stay tuned and gear up if you are serious about learning web site development. Using the tutorials that I am going to post here, you can build a web site for almost any theme or topic. Please subscribe to my blog RSS feeds by email - so that you will be notified whenever I make a new post.

Holiday Shopping in a “Recession”

It’s that time of the year again - when people shop like crazy. December is the month that accounts for highest amount of net sales - for almost every company, be it a product or service company. The mindset of buying “Gifts” for yourself or for some loved one gets you on the spending spree; and there is absolutely nothing wrong in it.

However, this year - it appears that a majority of people; are worried about their jobs (if they still have one secured). Indeed - US is in the middle of an economic recession; and this blog post talks about some smart money saving tips to help you enjoy your holiday season shopping; while keeping a check on your pockets!

The mantra for this holiday season is “Shop online with discount coupons“. A lot of people still don’t understand the benefits of shopping “online”. Except for some specific products (where you have to see it before buying it; like clothes for example) - most of the products/services can be bought online at prices much cheaper then retail prices. Even for products that requires you to wear/see it - you can always try it out in the store, take a note of the size, color, etc. and come back home to order the same thing online. You’d be saving a sizable amount on the very same item.

In addition to that - several companies have special holiday discounts that are only applicable to online purchases and are time sensitive. Add up those discounts and you’d be surprised to see the final price tag come down to as low as half the original price (sometimes even lower). The result - you get to buy all those gifts you wished for, at almost half the original price. The shipping costs are very reasonable and in most cases, waved off if the order amount is over a particular value. Again - as a part of special holiday discounts, you might as well get free shipping on your order.

Another great option is to go for “gift cards” - especially if you are planning on buying gifts. These gift cards are loaded with discount coupons and can be emailed to anyone. The recipient can then use it to shop for their item online or print it out and take it to the local store. It also gives them the flexibility to choose what they want. Check this out!

 

If you did not know - there are tens of thousands of web sites online, where you can get discounted prices on almost everything that you look for. All you have to do is open up your browser and search for what you need. The Internet world is not seeing any recession. If the Internet had been a real world - you’d be seeing a lot of construction work everywhere.

Yes - hundreds of web sites are getting launched every day on the World Wide Web. With time - it is only going to grow more and more. If you only have the patience to sit back and search online for some time – you can get any item you need; for a discounted price.

So - shop smart, shop online!  : - )

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