Advantages and Disadvantages of Having Your Own Photograph as Gravatar
Guest Post by Bashir Jutt.
Gravatar are the images that serve as your mask all over the Internet in general, and blogosphere to be more precise. However, while we see people paying a lot more attention to their Facebook profiles, they are quite careless towards Gravatar, which is equally (if not more) important than your social profiles. And while people will gladly put their own photographs at their FB page, they are often reluctant to use their own photographs in their Gravatar. Remember that the Gravatar will be accompanying everything you write on blogs including your posts, comments, or even guest posts, so you shouldn’t be taking it lightly if you are looking to make a mark in blogging community.
We can’t emphasize that using your own photograph is a must, because having your own image has its own advantages and disadvantages. Let’s have a look at the pros and cons to help you decide whether you should be using your own photograph or not.
Advantages
When you are using your own photograph in Gravatar, you will naturally be paying more attention to your writings, trying to be more grammatically and factually correct. Doing so will result in improved writing, as you will invest a little more time in researching and proofreading before you hit the publish, or submit button. Secondly, just like Social Networks, having your real photograph will make it easier for you to befriend with fellow bloggers, as people will be keener to communicate with someone with a real image instead of someone anonymous with a cartoon or blank image as their Gravatar. Coming back to the writing, while it wouldn’t make some poor writing appear good, but your comment or posts will be carrying a little more weight as compared to something coming from an anonymous user with no face. Lastly, having your own image will help you gain recognition and fame amongst your peers and you will end up making more friends at real life meet-ups and conferences.
Disadvantages
To start with, having your own photograph with everything you write will make you a little more conscious while writing and you might not be able to churn out posts like before, in short, you will be writing more quality stuff as compared to the quantity. At times, you might not be able to speak your heart out, since you will try to be more politically correct when posting with your real photograph, to make sure you are not infuriating people. Last but not the least, all the advantages of having your own photograph will turn into disadvantages if you aren’t using a good quality photograph with good background, since a fuzzy photograph will present you as someone who doesn’t take his/her cyber identity seriously, at all.
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Bashir is a full time blogger and an amateur photographer with a penchant for saving. That’s the reason he lists discount offers for Jupiter images promo code and photos.com promo codes at his website, that you can use to get some cool stock images from photos.com or Jupiter images, and perk up your Blog.
Read More3 Essentials to Effective Internet Marketing
Internet marketing is the new gold rush in the commercial world. And it’s not just big businesses that are whole-heartedly embracing online avenues, small businesses and even single-person entrepreneurs and freelancers now view the Internet as the de facto method for sales growth, exposure, and blog allegiance. Here are a few ground rules for responsible and effective Internet marketing:
Use affiliate marketing smartly.
Don’t litter your blog with hundreds of affiliate links and then get shocked when your readers are turned off. Pick and choose your affiliates carefully, as you would colleagues or partners in any kind of business environment. When you align yourself with an online merchant, you’re in a sense tying your reputation to theirs. If you’re against synthetic chemical-laden manufacturing, for example, and you’re considering affiliate links from companies who manufacture custom water bottles, make sure the company you endorse produces polycarbonate alternative bottles. The point is to make your links consistent, credible, and ethical. Nothing will destroy your credibility quicker than completely selling out your principles over a single affiliate.
Don’t be too repetitious.
Obviously, aggressive marketing requires certain levels of redundancy. How many times have you seen a company tweet the release of a new product a thousand different ways? Or send out multiple email newsletters in a single week? But don’t keep posting the exact same link to your Kickstarter page over and over again with no new information. This just makes you seem either desperate, dense, or dim-witted, depending on who your friends are. Always provide new information or a new context when reposting your own link.
Utilize several different platforms.
If you’re stuck on just Twitter or just Facebook you’re missing the point of social media. It’s not about one application, it’s about the totality of social media sites sharing, integrating and working together with powerful Internet tools like SEO. If you’re releasing a new project combine crowdfunding, viral video on YouTube, microblogging, podcasting, Fan Pages and whatever else you can think of. A successful Internet marketing campaign is rarely relegated to a single site. Diversify your portfolio, so to speak.
Do you consider yourself a self-promoter, a marketer, an advertiser? If the answer is yes, then you’ve probably dabbled in Internet marketing and will do so again in the future. Make sure you’re representing yourself and your brand effectively without being seen as distasteful, spammy, or tedious.
Read MoreUnlocking Your Future – the Key to Working from Home
Guest Post by James Martell
In my dad’s day, a businessman commuted from the suburbs to the office for hours each week, often traveling on business trips to meet with clients or suppliers, and spent more time away from home than he ever did with his family. Those days are disappearing, and it’s time to embrace a new normal.
Blast from the past
Back in 1998, when I first started understanding how the internet would be the future of business, everyone was a bit leery of it. When I did my first promotion for a company in the United States, everybody thought it was crazy for a Canadian like me to do business with someone from another country, not to mention someone I had never even met. I must admit I had my own doubts about it, but they were all laid to rest when the first check cleared the bank.
Today’s Information Age
Flash forward twelve years and the internet is the way we all do business, so why are so many of us still leaving our homes and families to punch a time clock in an office? Working from home is the key to your freedom and happiness; you just have to follow some simple guidelines and success can be yours.
Create your own space
Start by creating your own work space. Working from home is great, because it allows you the freedom to manage your own time and do with it what matters most, but you can’t treat your work time like home time. Creating a separate space to be your work area is essential, and allows you to mentally focus on your work, as well as keep things organized.
Some people I’ve talked to prefer to create their own office, complete with a nice home office computer desk and filing cabinets. Others prefer to make a section in their garage or a corner of the bedroom their work area. However much space you need, or the tools you require, just make sure it is a space that is all your own, and dedicated solely to your work. No setting up on half the kitchen the table and pretending you can eat dinner around it or the kids won’t scatter it. It just doesn’t work!
Social marketing
Use the internet to work for you. It’s important to realize that there’s a lot of competition out there these days, and you’ll need more going for you than just a well written landing page if you’re going to be a success. You’re going to have to make what you’re offering look appealing to the consumer and convince them that others think it has value too. Whatever you’re selling, whether it’s a product or a service, one of the best ways to sell it is with social marketing.
Just as our parents turned to the yellow pages or watched ads on TV, today everybody goes to search engines like Google when they want or need something. It’s the first place many of us get our information now.
When we want to know if the information we gathered from the web is credible, we rely on people we know for endorsements. The power of word of mouth has grown immeasurably since the advent of Facebook and Twitter. Millions of consumers are turning to these resources before making purchases and more and more of us are doing the actual buying or ordering on the internet as well. I’m sure you’ve found this to be true in your own life just as I have. These are great tools that you can use to your advantage. By getting people to talk about your product or service and consumers will seek you out.
Tools of tomorrow, here today
If all this sounds like a lot of work, just remember, you don’t have to do it all alone. Working from home isn’t for hermits or the antisocial. Thanks to today’s technology, it is as vibrant and active and social as you want to make it.
- Increase knowledge and education with webinars.
- Bring the boardroom right into your home by holding meetings and networking with them through business video conferencing or Skype.
- Utilize smart phone apps or laptops to access everything you need anywhere you go.
Do all the things you want to do with your life, and still have the access to handle all your business needs and communicate with the people you need to accomplish it all. Social networking is first and foremost about keeping social as much as you can.
Follow these guidelines and you’ll be on the path to success, and free to enjoy it when you achieve it. Your future is just waiting for you.
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James Martell, author of the Affiliate Marketers Handbook works from his home office computer desk teaching others how to make money with affiliate programs utilizing powerful tools like business video conferencing.
Read MoreTechnology and Today’s Social Interaction
Guest Post by Pat Tate
Two sides of the same coin
We all enjoy spending time chatting with friends. It is such a wonderful world, isn’t it? It is such a pleasure reading through micro-blogs written by our friends and looking through the photographs on Facebook. It probably makes us happier than anything when our display picture is ‘liked’ by so many people.
Board games were fun, but that was a long time back when there wasn’t much interesting online. But today, the world is different! Information sharing and networking has never been easier. E-bay is such a boon, when you can pretend like you have spent days looking for that perfect gift for your girlfriend!
And then comes a point in time, when you lose all the fun abruptly! Your mother asks you to get yourself out of that room and go along to the vegetable market. The heat outside makes you wish you could shop for vegetables also online! However, tough times do not last, and you get back into the protected and very comfortable zone of the air-conditioned room with your very own laptop!
Things get better with each passing second in from of the laptop with you over whelmed in the extraordinary world of Internet while you conveniently forget that you were going to purchase Lego Hogwarts Board Game for your best friend’s birthday!
This surely is not an uncommon event. Everyone must have had a similar, if not exact occurrence in life. And surely, we all try and ignore it as stress and infrequent absent-mindedness. But there is something else that researchers have to say about it.
Well, for one point, the scientists working on theories that explain about stress and depression hold an opinion that the high levels of stress are directly related to their addiction to Internet and computer based life. They say that slowly but surely the whole world is turning into a place of web-addicts.
They say that a group of people classified as ‘heavy users’ of computers in general and Internet in particular, are found to have severe stress and also in a lot of cases acutely prone to depression. They find it extremely difficult to mingle with the normal social groups and show a variety of signs of a consistent unhappy life. Of course, this is only in regard with people who are heavy users.
Also, taking into consideration the fact that this research was done was back in 1998, when Internet was a treasure for a limited lot, we have to be forewarned that these symptoms would have grown more common in today’s world. We need more surveys and statistics in order to know how the world today is faring against the Internet invasion.
Despite the fact that it is a very small fraction of people who suffer this syndrome critically, it is important to note that a large majority of us are prone to it today. Most of the users of computers already show typical signs of stress and depression though the effects are very mild.
Carnegie Mellon University was one of the foremost places in the world where the issue of computer addiction was taken up seriously as a matter of mental illness. Lots of work in terms of study, research and documentation has been done since. Also, surprisingly, even without Facebook or Twitter still active in the plethora of online applications researchers at the university had found an abject need to study the negative consequences of computer addiction.
Today, computer addiction has overgrown to a stage where it has become a threatening possibility of an epidemic. Think about a time when pastimes were still playing a game of chess with a neighbor or practicing music. Surely, they would have thought it lame to imagine a world obsessed with the electronic machine, trying to make friends with people you don’t even know.
An addiction beyond anything that man had ever known before!
They said alcohol was the root-cause to all problems in life. With alcohol came instability, monetary loans and losses, losing track of personal life, irresponsibility, gambling and other vices. Trust me, Internet addiction leads to all these vices; in fact, only more directly. With Internet addiction, you tend to lose track of life and most importantly social responsibilities and the tactics to deal with the society.
A medium of communication that keeps you from doing it!
Yes, isn’t that exactly what the computer communication is doing to us these days? Yes, we agree the social-media is in itself a massive tool for communicating what you think to the world. It gives us a variety of options through which you could speak up your mind to the world. You could speak to people; make friends, exchange information and shop on the web. You could actually even look for Top Toy Christmas 2011, right a click away on the Internet, instead of going all the way to the store!
However expressive the ‘smileys’ in Facebook might get they surely cannot bring forth the expression that dwells on your face. Communication in the face-to-face mode is often a mixture of facial expressions, mannerisms and mild modifications in voice and tone. All this cannot be accommodated into the set of words that make up your conversation during the online networking.
Scientists say that meeting people everyday makes one a more confident person in general. Face-to-face communication on a daily basis apparently, also serves as a magnet to pull you away from web-addiction. And then, there is of course the advantage of making real friends that know you better than just your words.
In fact, some scientists also claim that friends made over Internet break up too easily. They say that these bonds are based on unreliable factors which make them weak and easy to lose. In turn, a life full of such empty relationships tends to become superficial and fake. It doesn’t take too long for a person to feel distressed about being unable to make real friends and the end-result without exception is low confidence and depression.
Smart bloggers- Shy speakers
The young mind is often the devil’s workshop, because it is so easily influenced. Parents have relentlessly found a problem with their kids’ addiction to a lot of things- junk food, television- and now the Internet. It is not surprising that there are so many under-age owners of Facebook profiles today!
We shouldn’t forget that it is often more serious an issue than just ‘sticking to the laptop always’. What is more important is the adverse effect of this inappropriate addiction.
Youngsters today often suffer from under-confidence and lack of focus. In working environments they find solace in closed cabins instead team building activities. This is not checked in the right time could lead to isolation from social circles, which is not such a good thing, after all!
Real problems need real solutions
Life is never fair. Life is imperfect. You might feel that you are a little too heavy for your height. You might think you do not have the most perfect face. You might think your more successful colleague is a fake. You might not want to face embarrassment, failure or disgrace.
The Internet, in these problems, offers a quick and short-term solution- escape. Social-networking sites offer you a new world. In this world, you can afford to be everything you actually wish you were in real life. You can be your hero, and can hear everyone sign your praise.
However, what is not in place is the fact that however much we choose to run from real problems, they keep chasing us back. Solutions lie not in the glorified fake world of social media but in the dull and boring everyday life full of challenges and questions.
Realize that escaping to a virtual world will never solve your problem. Find the nerve to tackle your situations with smartness and positivity, life in reality is much more beautiful than any glorified fake.
The common-place thing
This has over the past two decades become the in-thing. Back then, there were board games for people to play. And they would have expected that we would be playing better versions of the same board game in the years to follow. What we did, is buying a Lego Hogwarts Board Game online or rather playing an online version of it, altogether!
Everybody loves chatting online and creating profiles on Facebook. Each one is busy interacting with a large bunch of online-friends. Everyone loves doing this, so this must be the right thing to do. With so much inspiration, we all definitely know what is right. Right?
Sometimes, it might also be the easier thing to do, to sit online, than go out and play basketball with a bunch of friends.
A good thing after all!
It is common sense to understand that if something were to get as popular as the Internet and other forms of computer usage, it had a reason why it did.
The Internet is a big mass of information. It connects you to knowledge and people from different parts of the world. It creates a platform over which you could connect to a diverse range of people from different countries and languages. This surely gives you an edge over the non-users when it comes to the variety of friends you make.
The Internet is a place that connects people. It connects people with friends, buyers with sellers, actors with fans, writers with readers, and you with the world! You could get anything by booking it on the Internet- from a fresh pizza to Top Toy Christmas 2011.
There have been researches, which say that people connected through the Internet to a wider population have shown to recover from ailments by mutual understanding and connection due to similarity.
So, what should you do? Is the Internet good, or is it bad?
It doesn’t take extreme smartness to understand that everything in the world comes with advantages and disadvantages. It is always a package of good and bad and in the end, it is for us to choose what proportions of these qualities we choose into our personalized pack.
- Time limits are often easy ways to analyze your Internet usage. Once you know how much you are using today, you have your solution. They say, half the solution to the problem lies in understanding the problem itself.
- Read, write and listen to music. Try and list out what you used to do way before the Internet became such an indispensable part of your life. Make them a part of your life now. It’ll help you de-stress in addition to getting you rid of your web-addiction.
- Did you ever spend hours on the Internet changing pages and not sticking to anything in particular? It could be because of boredom. Maybe it isn’t really what you want to do, but end up doing as a mere matter of lethargy to think of options. Answer this question, and find a solution for many other unasked ones.
- Make a detailed time-table as to how you would rid yourself of the addiction. Like de-addiction from alcohol or drugs, Internet-de-addiction also needs a serious forethought a plan. Make it a point to plan easy steps and achievable goals and begin the program right away. Tomorrow never comes!
- Get yourself some exercise. Often it might happen that you might get stressed out working on the computer. Your mind might be tired, but the body not-so-tired. This is when it leads to insomnia and restlessness. Find the sport you enjoy most and engage a couple of friends to join you play it. This way, you’ll reduce stress and make friends; two birds in one catch!
We must always know and understand that the Internet got to our doorsteps all the knowledge in the world. It is a symbol of information and communication. It got to us people and places that would never have touched our lives otherwise.
We must take Internet as a boon and use it responsibly. Choose what part of it helps us become better people and carefully filter out the over-dependency. That is the key to a great, informed and happy life!
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As a senior Pat Tate started to explore Internet Marketing. She uses her blog as a journal to keep track of the people and programs that she has met along the way. Grandma’s Internet Marketing/blog. She is an avid golfer and invites women to join her to talk golf at Women’s Golf Center. She has always loved toys and as the proud Grandmother of five beautiful Grandchildren she gets to play with new ones at Grandma’s Toy Review.
Read MoreCJU Keynote: So what drives customer engagement, anyway?
2011’s keynote speaker was the very informative Dr. Jeffrey F. Rayport, Ph.D. Jeffrey coined the term “viral marketing” and brings an incredible knowledge of the online commerce space. He advises businesses in rethinking how they interact with their customers. His keynote focused on how the networked world requires new approaches to drive customer engagement, which in turn is changing the face of online and multi-channel commerce.
Last year’s keynote was informative, but dry. This year’s keynote was awesome. Dr. Rayport was informative as all get out while being funny and engaging all at the same time. I’d love to see him speak again, and I definitely ended the keynote feeling jazzed to keep learning more and energized for my meetings!
Bullet Point Review!
- Consumers have changed over the decades
- Consumer 1.0: Demand was greater than supply
- Consumer 2.0: Demand was equal to supply
- Consumer 3.0: Supply is greater than demand
- We’re all in the business of demand generation.
- Engaging and captivating consumers is key.
- Toyota’s Scion is a great cast study of how to do it right.
- Scion never spent money on TV advertising: 60% allocation of their marketing budget to events and 40% to online advertising.
- Made a lot of after market peripherals and accessories for the car.
- It’s changing the way car buying works. Most owners customize their Scions online.
- Integrate social networks, read dynamic comments, follow Twitter streams.
- 2/3 of the 100 million streams of videos happen on exterior sites, not YouTube.com
- StumbleUpon now accounts for over 50% of all the referral traffic from the topographic social media sites. There are 12 million SU users vs. 750 million Facebook users and yet SU just surpassed Facebook.
- Best Buy extends multiple-channel retail experience into many useful OUTGOING points of presence, such as Facebook, online magazines, mobile apps, Twitter-based customer service, and crowd sourced ideas.
- A single social graph can become a vast constellation of thousands of INCOMING points of presence.
- With the proliferation of local deals and offers, mobile couponing is growing rapidly in appeal.
- It’s expected that 16.5% of adult mobile phone users will be using mobile coupons by 2013.
- iPhone and iPad apps enable mobile access to flash sales with “call to action” offers for people on the go.
- To boost mobile sales, companies have provided a “virtual shop window” for the retail experience without the inventory. Ocado in the UK has a store front, you can scan the barcodes on the window with your mobile phone and order items.
- Mobile smart phone apps provide branded city guides to deepen brand engagement and drive sales.
- Hulu’s move beyond online video streaming is fueling growth for it’s business and content owners, too. It went from a website to having multiple platforms to provide premium content.
- The highest productivity retailer in the world as measured by retail sales per square foot is the Apple Store.
- Publishers and advertisers will win consumers not through Customer Relationship Management, but Customer Managed Relationships.
- Forget segments and niches in the traditional sense.
Dr. Rayport’s 5 Main Takeways:
- Target your diehard fans: put them in the driver’s seat
- Social the brand: make rewards matter
- Work the web: let the outside in and the inside out
- Experience is everything: form factors rule
- Integrate the touch points: be savvy and seamless
ThinkTank Remix 2011: ‘El’evated Marketing Tools
This is the one other set of notes I still have from May’s ThinkTank Remix conference. Next week I’ll share the way more recent CJU notes with you 🙂
- IAB has new standard sizes and de-listed a bunch of common sizes. Most managers agree that it’s more important to listen to your affiliates as to what they need first.
- A lot of blog templates automatically included spaces for 125×125 & 468×60 so you should include those or you might lose a lot of bloggers.
- Must be very responsive to your affiliates and what their needs are.
- If you’re going to have an extensive text link library, be sure to include all the various landing pages.
- Being able to customize where links land … Deep linking is critical.
- Optimize the first still image in the video…call to action, not commercial so it doesn’t scream ad, most users drop off video at 45 seconds so get your offer across in 10, main point in 30, make sure your background soundtrack isn’t too loud.
- ShareASale uses Flash & sometimes the browser needs to upgrade to the latest version of Flash, so including a small text link suggesting the viewers upgrade flash on their browser is a good practice.
- As an affiliate, I’m not going to use the video if you have a 800 # that’s not tracked or mention your website a bunch of times (thus encouraging viewers to type it in instead of clicking on the site’s affiliate links. Mentioning the product is much better.
- Giving your affiliates content standards & suggested content makes it easy for them. The merchants did the research to know what works.
- Experience with the product helps, so if you can get the product into their hands, that’s beneficial.
- The content you need is already on the merchant’s site. That’s the content that converts their customers. Don’t copy it blatantly but replicate it and improve upon it.
- Give affiliates a heads up on media exposure of your product.
- People spend most of their time on the web on published content (53%). 23% social media, 7% email.
- Create your own surveys & share the results.
- 66% of content is shared via email. 28% social networking, 4 IM, 1 message boards, 1 personal blog.
- 99% of people sharing through social media are sharing via multiple platforms.
- Start collecting emails (double opt in) start small but start today. Email is very neglected in affiliate marketing. Instant traffic.
- 20% of sales coming from the links people share what they bought.
- Include the social sharing!
- People are still comfortable with the brand advertising/ sharing on their news feeds on Facebook.
- If people know who’s behind the business, they see those notes as sharing not as advertising.
- Engage people because Facebook pays attention & burgs things that don’t get interaction.
- Just asking a question & tell them what to do (Like this) is better than nothing.
