No one knows when and how Pinterest became a social media site for the fair and the homely( not literally). Probably it had something to do with the marketing and product positioning, but it’s kind of difficult to understand the kind of stereotype that surrounds Pinterest. Men don’t want to be associated with something that has everything to do with pictures and posters. They don’t want to be a part of the kitty party planners and home decors. But isn’t that exactly why Pinterest was created – so that men don’t have to be a part of the girlie rigmaroles. There is, however, a reason to argue that that Pinterest is a gender neutral social media platform. You just have to be creative enough to find your place, five of which are listed as follows:

1. Memes: For those who don’t know what memes are – ‘y u no Google memes’. Surprising one of the top most searched queries on the Internet pertains to these funny little one lines. From hilarious to sarcastic, memes are Pinterest classics, for guys to flaunt their collection unabashedly.
2. Motivation: You don’t really have to be a sucker for sib stories, but motivational pins sell well on the platform. They will get you a lot of fan following, especially from the opposite sex. Even if it is just about the impression, your motivational pins will not fail to do the trick.
3. Gaming: Let’s face it; games work like a magnet on any guy. Even at 40, you’ll see them happily speeding their car in a video game and beating anyone who tries to temper with them. Pinterest is a great platform to search and organize the games that you wish to get your hands on. Put in some extra effort and you might get a whole bunch of buddies to play with via Pinterest.
4. Food: Needless to say, food cannot be categorized on the basis of gender. For the men who love to treat their taste buds and try classic cuisines every now and then, Pinterest is a delectable platform.

Once you are there, pinning-up interesting ideas and jokes on boards, it will be an experience worth changing your mind, or at least your opinions.

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Internet and Indian youth are two inseparable threads that are weaving the face of our nation at the speed of light. Books and newspapers are fighting a losing battle against what is becoming the future of a more modernized and globalized India. If we have to summarize India’s future with internet in a nutshell, it is nothing less than brilliant.

Here are some of the ways in which we have categorized these points:

1. Greater Internet means cheaper internet: There was a time when having an internet connection at home was meant for the richer upper class, or for people who were supposedly more “advanced”. These days not having an internet connection at home is equivalent to not having any butter in the fridge. With the large number of internet connections getting installed each day, the cost has gone down and has become easily affordable for all.
2. People’s worlds are on the web: From online shopping, to booking flight tickets, everything is done online. With the increasing stress at work, people do not have time to shop or even get groceries. Making these facilities available online, the younger generation is becoming more and more dependent on what can be ordered online and home delivered.
3. Social Networking: People in India, especially the younger generation sleep and eat through popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. No one has the time or patience to wait. Instant chat and messaging through such mediums has become popular and this trend is only inclined to grow forward and not backward.
4. Employment: With so many job search portals like naukri.com and timesjobs.com people now have a quick step solution in finding the right job. The process has become simple for employers as well since they can hand pick the best from any industry and the entire process is uncomplicated and free of any error.
5. The 3G craze: Everything can be easily accessed through mobile phones since they now come with a 3G technology, and this further strengthens the bright prospect of internet in India.

The world is shrinking with every passing day because of Internet. What happens somewhere in America can reach the Indian News Desk real time because of the speed at which information is transmitted. In 2010 India was ranked 4th in terms of its Internet users across the globe, and that was just 3 years ago! India is advancing and social media is catching up faster than anything else. The wireless age would be nothing less than extraordinary in times to come.

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Being a writer is more than just scribbling words on a piece of paper, or typing at the speed of light on a PC. What usually gets in the way of a prolific writer and the spectrum of thoughts is the most dreaded syndrome for any writer, “the writer’s block”. Every writer has gone through this at numerous points and it is not something you can perpetually get rid of.

However the good news is that there are ways to fight it when it comes around. It is more like a ‘flu’ or fever that is temporary, and the cure does exist.

1. There is no such thing as “enough reading”: That would be like saying “I have eaten enough, and now I do not have to eat for the rest of my life”. The key to be a good and productive writer is to expand your reading. But only reading a certain type of genre is not enough. Venture out and read all kinds of books, because while some would interest and entertain you, others would end up educating you.
2. Document ideas in a journal: even if you are on your way to the grocery store and something you see or hear triggers off a profound thought in your mind, jot it down. Keeping these random thoughts in one place may be a good idea for when you are stuck for ideas.
3. Make an outline before you fill in the colors: It is important to brainstorm ideas before you actually sit down to write an article. Think about the subject, think about your views on it, ask people questions related to it, and then write out some bullet points which you can then elaborate on. This will help your thoughts flow and would also give your literary piece more structure.
4. Write out of habit: Even a healthy person exercises to keep their body fit and lean. In the same way it is important to keep writing consistently. If one does not write regularly, they would get stuck with ideas more often. The more you write, the better you learn to channelize your thoughts.

Practice makes you perfect or at least near perfect. The key is to keep writing even if you don’t think you have reached your potential, because ultimately you would. Giving up and getting annoyed is only going to slow down the thought process. Staying calm and taking time out is the best way to get back into your thoughts because a positive mind is the only way to produce positive thoughts and ideas and to get rid of the writer’s block.

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While a few corporate executives admit uncertainty over social media optimization or its relevance, an overwhelming majority will admit that they foresee greater assignment of funds to the same. While only few businesses select professional services, some challenges remain.

Following are the obstacles that can be avoided.

1. Lack of Awareness

Social media optimization requires understanding the brand from the audience’s point of view, competitor’s aspect, and important terms, which is the first step. Ignoring this could lead to lost opportunities in all respects, like sales, collaborating, customer services, and others.

2. Cohesive Accountability

After establishing the goals, assigning responsibilities and accepting an overall accountability is necessary. Different departments must combine efforts to benefit the business. This prevents any possible brand misrepresentation.

3. Irregular Involvement

Consistently engaging audiences means regular participation in social media optimization tasks. Executive endorsements enable feedback to contributors, which grow the community. Having a dedicated community member as a curator or brand ambassador encourages community participation and displays the level of involvement.

4. Gaining Trust

To earn belief, a company needs confidence. Developing a sincere and passionate community depends immensely on the depth of participation of the company itself. More than opinions, a sense of conviction and strong will stand apart as respectable elements, which builds a reputable presence for social media optimization.

5. Ill-equipped Team

The emphasis is on understanding more than doing, as it is an approach more than a task.  Having your team undergo the requisite training will reduce the difficulty.

 6. Data Roadblocks

While data is essential to decision making, it should never restrict the capacities of the creative department. Most often, a spectacular creative idea can be the game changer, becoming a historic event in social media campaigns.

 7. Generalised Individualism

In addition to maintain a unique element, the real team members can support social media work. Rather than having a nameless person behind your brand, establish partnerships and acknowledge others for commendable work. Simply being useful with a focus will benefit you as well. With social dissent being expressed as well, a tactful and calm approach is required, even a light-hearted acceptance performs the necessary to maintain audience loyalty.

Conclusion

Ultimately, companies earn social media optimization by thorough strategy development, experimental innovations, and repetition of wholesome efforts and a fundamental framework. With these seven guidelines, your brand can fuel its progress on the path to realizing a robust market share and wider visibility.

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Webinars may seldom be charming. However, they are the most widely recognized application of business to virtual space. The ball got rolling with globalization driving internet and social media towards business virtualization.

Professionals work online, train online, and worry more about online reputation management than about the relations that they share with their colleagues. Within all this, webinars consume a significant and vital space. Let’s face it though; they are boring and unbearable to the extent of torturing. Moreover, they seem like a one way ‘forced’ conversation. Since they are obviously ultimately boring they don’t have a great success rate. How do you turn the tables then, and make them one of the best ways to capture audience interest? Here are a few tips:

Bring Out the Blog: Pre webinar blog posts often give people a fine idea about what the webinar would entail. They work like an energizer and motivator.  Keep the blog crisp and concise. Don’t give out the details here. The blog will serve as a guide or a manual to evoke participation in the webinar.

Focus on Industry Updates: A webinar without current industry updates is like stale bread. You can’t make anything out of it. Facts and figures are important; and so are trends. Even if there is nothing interesting to talk about, the way you present the numbers can make the whole difference. Invite people to comment on the trends and talk about what they think about progress. Ask them if they see progress happening, or otherwise.

Understand Audience Behaviour: People are likely to pay attention to other social media platforms, happily chatting their time away if they encounter even a bit of boredom during a webinar. Analyzing and understanding audience behaviour and reaction is a way of predicting feedback. Mock webinars can help you get more accurate results.

As the adage goes – first impressions are the last impressions – so is the case with webinars too. A welcome slide for the webinar should hook the audience. Your half the job is done there and then, is it? No! You need to proceed in an equally engaging manner to make your webinar a hit.

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Content marketing implies gaining a substantially higher following on online platforms, with an aim to benefit business.

These five techniques will help to uplift the performance of your web content and social approach.

1. Allies
Symbiotic functioning for mutual achievement of goals is effective. Website partners exponentially increase visibility and improve ad impression, as well as provide better page rankings.

In content marketing, a potential business partner can be from another industry, but should merge with a common ideology. For instance, a website of footwear reviews would team up with a foot care specialist or footwear store.

A few criteria for choosing a partner are:

• They have considerable traffic and cater to needs of a similar demographic in a different manner.
• Feature articles, guest posts, and alternative methods to enrich content visibility. Trade guest posts, run product features, and seek creative new ways to expose your content to a broader audience.
• Utilizing online means to implement relevant advertising that boosts audience segmentation and target acquisitions.

2. Platforms
Establishing a presence on every social media site, is a waste. Building and developing the same on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or LinkedIn, should be done in addition to using referral sites and fresher networks where exposure is higher. Inbound traffic and search engine rankings improve when sharing buttons are available.

Produce content ideally suited for newer platforms of huge referral potential. For instance, Pinterest is image specific. Creating top-quality visuals with artful or creatively witty copy would work well.

• Refresh your existing content by transforming each form into another periodically. For example, turn a past blog post into a video or a past video into a single visual graphic of data.

3. Audience Empowerment
Giving the audience this ability means getting them to work for your cause. Content marketing means allowing the audience to keep the campaign alive as it permeates different levels of the market. Nike, with the #makeitcount campaign, for instance, superbly carried out this requirement.

• Allow audience to communicate through the brand. Sharing any information is encouraged and appreciated. It helps build brand reputation and goodwill among consumers.

4. Earning Share-worthy Status
Simple language, a casual and assertive approach, and insights on trending topics, all attract fundamental human actions towards content marketing.

• Streamlined content, which requires a glance to gain a gist.

• Using confirmations of online shares or hosting a sweepstakes for most shares from a first level.

5. Extract Useful Data
Uncovering facts about the habits of the target audience, their rate of engagement, participation, and preferences, depends on analytics and scrutiny of data. With the help of online tools, this can be done easily.

Content marketing requires comprehensive effort and purposeful performance. Including these five strategies along with social modes enables faster goal realisation and revenue generation.

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When launching a new site or revamping an existing one, social media optimization remains the crux, in order to attract an interested demographic and to grow brand awareness and visibility. With these five tips, you can understand and avoid the most common mistakes in this sphere. 

Specifying Domains: This simply means that you should have the favourable option of either http://www.xyz.com or http://xyz.com. Redi­recting the preferable one solves this quickly.

JavaScript and CSS Control: For aspirations of search engine optimization, framework sites that are plug-in heavy have this problem. If cutting down on the script used and the CSS displayed is not feasible, running them through external files will enable faster load times.

Exam­ple: <script type=‘text/relevant-type’ src=‘http:/xyz.com/location-of-relevant-file.js’></script>

Advantages of Sitemap: Using an XML sitemap is hugely beneficial. The tools for this are available online in abundance.

Search engine optimization is achieved by making your pages and website more discoverable as search engines pick them up. It also assigns degrees of importance to different content.

Title Tag Format: While title tags are elements to the page header, they could also be visible at the top, depending on the browser.

It is also the text, which can be clicked as the results appear in an organic search. Not only are they a ranking criterion, but they also influence click-through rates.

Points:

• Title tags should not cross 70 cha­rac­ters, with spaces
• Avoid excessively filling with keywords
• Essential keywords should comprise the start of each title tag

Lac­king or Dupli­cate Desc­rip­tion Tags: Desc­rip­tion tags are visible in search results. They appear below clickable text and are created by search engines, which assign importance, when the tags are not compiled. It is far better to decide for yourself on the information that will be visible to your audience rather than automated decisions, in this case at least.

The possibly worst and most common mistake in search engine optimization functioning is the repeated usage of a description tag across multiple pages. This makes the process redundant and it is better to have blank descriptions for other pages.

Rules of Thumb:

• With spaces, description tags should not exceed 150 characters
• Every page should have a distinct description tag
• These tags should complement title tag keywords.

Gaining an insight into these unpopular mistakes that most websites and businesses make empowers you to succeed, without the impediment of wary operations. Follow these tips and make good on your promise to operate a website with full search engine optimization.

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