Tips to Choosing a Blog Topic
Building Successful blog is the dream of every blogger. Success of blog depends on many factors like Topic, Passion to the topic etc. Here lets discus s some points you should care when choosing your blog topic.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Reference:
http://tech2.in.com/features/smartphones/5-reasons-why-iphones-dont-come-cheap-in-india/259362?utm_source=nldaily&utm_medium=email
http://tech2.in.com/features/smartphones/5-reasons-why-iphones-dont-come-cheap-in-india/259362?utm_source=nldaily&utm_medium=email
5 Reasons why iPhones don't come cheap in India
There has been fury generating amongst Apple fans in India, ever since the prices of the new iPhone 4S for India was unveiled.
There has been fury generating amongst Apple fans in India, ever since the prices of the new iPhone 4S for India was unveiled. The prices received contempt across the nation and the various social media outlets. Fans across the country vented their annoyance, by talking about anything and everything that is cheaper than the new iPhone 4S, including a quick trip to Bangkok or Dubai. The iPhone 4S has been made available for pre-order through Airtel (doesn’t list the 64GB version) and Aircel at similar prices – 16GB for Rs.44,000, 32GB for Rs.50,900 and 64GB for Rs.57,500.
We asked Airtel, Aircel and Apple the reason behind such high prices, the current number of pre-orders and would it be a hurdle to sell the iPhone 4S? What we got is a royal run around for a simple question – why are we paying so much for the iPhone 4S? One company told us to simply speak to the other and vice versa. While Aircel decided not to comment, an Airtel spokesperson said that it would be appropriate to reach out to the Apple team for pricing related queries, but further added, “While Apple has a uniform base price across the world, the local price differences take into account the import and local taxes as well as changes in exchange rate.” On the other hand, a spokesperson from Apple India said, “We have no comment to offer on the pricing and on the pre-orders, as that's something you need to check with our carrier partner's Airtel and Aircel.”
Looking back, iPhones have always carried outrageous price tags in the Indian market. Remember when the iPhone 3G was officially launched in India in August 2008? The handset featured a 30K+ price tag, even then. Although it was a huge sum for a smartphone then, Apple fans (who could afford it) bought the device, sooner or later. Today, the 64GB iPhone 4S carries a price tag I wouldn’t want to pay for a phone or tablet, but it states - Sold Out on Aircel’s page and didn’t make it to the Airtel page. The question arises, would a price sensitive Indian market spend more than half a lakh on a smartphone?
Amidst the blame game and looking at all the aspects, we tried to decipher 5 Reasons why iPhones carry such a high price in India.
Brand Wow, you own an iPhone! Sounds familiar, isn’t it? As a brand, Apple products enjoy a high position across the globe. It has a strong fan base, which is the reason why the devices are sold even with high price tags. In India, you won’t find every other person owning an iPhone, it’s just a small portion that loves and enjoys the device, despite the price hurdles. Seemingly in India, the iPhone has always been an extremely high-end phone, right from the launch of the iPhone 3GS and has found its place as a symbol of class and style. It probably targets a specific audience and enjoys a brand position that also equals the price that a network carrier attaches to it. 
Why iPhones are priced so high?
Network Carriers We all are well aware that when any device is imported to India, additional charges have to be dealt with. The launch of iPhone 4S also faces the recent depreciation of rupee against dollar and other applicable taxes. Apple has a tradition of bundling its devices with carrier plans to earn a portion of the contract, even a year after the device is sold and its next iteration has reached the market. Three years back, it was unlikely if a customer would sign a 2-3 year contract. This time around when iPhone 3G/3GS were launched, they were SIM locked, but there was no contract. This could have been the reason why network carriers ensured that they don’t undergo any losses after the device is sold and stretched the price tag as much as possible. Potential market There is no denying that Apple doesn’t see India as a potential iPhone market, yet. Apple may possibly not even have an India specific strategy to sell more products. It could be even waiting for a wider outreach of the 3G services or launch of 4G services. The Airtel page doesn’t display the 64GB iPhone, while the Aircel page says it sold out. The question is, how many 64GB models were even ordered by the network carriers? According to an IDC research, statistically more iPhones are shipped to Norway than India in a year, which has a population close to the NCR region. Other Factors With the latest iPhone landing on the Indian soil, there are several factors that have affected its price like import duties, local taxes and also the depreciation of rupee against dollar. The high price is also triggered by the fact that in India, network providers have to set an affordable data plan. Overall, we still don’t have a major mobile audience using Internet mostly via phones. In the U.S., the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB iPhone 4S is sold for $199 (approx Rs.10,470), $299 (approx Rs. 15,737) and $399 (approx Rs. 21,001), respectively. However, there is a difference in the data plans offered by AT&T, Sprint and Verizon starting at $54.99 (approx Rs. 2,894) to $169.99 (approx Rs.8,949). On the other hand, Aircel promotes it with a two year data plan starting at Rs.950 up to Rs.1,350. Subsidization: There is no subsidization of products by network carriers. For example – AT&T offers the iPhone 3GS at a subsidized rate. You don’t see Airtel doing the same. Due to subsidization, the product becomes cheaper for users in the U.S., as average revenue per users (approximately) for AT&T is $50+ and for Airtel its $8+. 
iPhone 4S price starts at Rs. 44,500
However, to give you a fair comparison of the kind of price differences, we’ve taken a Samsung Galaxy S II that sells for around Rs.29,900 in India (maybe, cheaper in some other stores). The same phone, unlocked, sells at a price of $559, which translates to roughly Rs.29,300. The iPhone 4S is rumoured to be launched at a price of $649, which is already higher than the S II. Assuming that there’s a 5 percent import duty on the phone, this should end up in Indian markets at about Rs.35,700. An additional 5 percent of local taxes would still keep the price well under Rs.38,000. So, is the over-hyped iPhone 4S over-priced? The iPad was sold for $499 in the U.S. and priced around Rs. 29,000 in India when launched. The 16GB iPhone 4 was priced at Rs. 35,000 in India and its unlocked version cost $599 which is approximately around 31,000 in the U.S.
The 16GB iPhone 4 was priced at Rs. 35,000 in India and its unlocked version cost $599 which is approximately around 31,000 in the U.S. Inspite of the high prices, the popularity of the dainty device doesn’t seem to fade. Talking precisely about iPhone 4S and potential buyers planning to buy it from the international market will have to let go of the warranty. This is unlike the iPad ,which was, quite unusually, priced quite well in our part of the world. |
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Optimize Your Blog
Optimizing blogs is a usual question that most of the people ask when they learn about great earnings that many successful bloggers have. Hearing such success stories most of the people who are familiar with internet used to try and fail blogging. For those who are hard working and dedicated on can be successful by attracting traffic.
Google Add sense is one of the best facility which share their income from add with people who drive view to the add.
I present here the core of opinions and instructions by experts which are available over internet. I have read a lot of articles and abstracted them to easily understand.
1.Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain
A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are - Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or Wordpress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page - this is the best solution).
2.Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind
Target two types of people one who may visit your blog or those who have subscribed to feeds of your blog. Tags should be abstract, descriptive of contents, adhere to topic and convey the message.
3.Think about Search Engines.
When you title your posts, think about search engines as a source of traffic to your blog, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. One of the great way is to write post and title first, then go for some searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery which help to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.
4.Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
There are bloggers, forums and an online community related to somewhat all topics, so it is so difficult to find topics that may not be subject to some other blogs. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority). Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).-
5.Tag Your Content
Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one isBlogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it's worth it). You DO NOT want to submit every post to these sites, but that one out of twenty (see tactic #18) is worth your while.
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Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren't. Just because there's huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends - this is because they're already popular, established and are counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you're launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable - not just the same story from your point of view. This is less important in spaces where there are very few bloggers and little online coverage and much more in spaces that are overwhelmed with blogs (like search, or anything else tech-related).
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When you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familiar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. Also, be aware that quoting other bloggers or online sources (or even discussing their ideas) without linking to them is considered bad etiquette and can earn you scorn that could cost you links from those sources in the future. It's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. And link condoms? Only use them when you're linking to something you find truly distasteful or have serious apprehension about.
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Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute a short blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to grow the value and reach of your blog. You not only flatter the person by acknowledging their celebrity, you nearly guarantee yourself a link or at least an association with a brand that can earn you readers. Just be sure that you really are getting a quality post from someone that's as close to universally popular and admired as possible (unless you want to start playing the drama linkbait game, which I personally abhor). If you're already somewhat popular, it can often be valuable to look outside your space and bring in guest authors who have a very unique angle or subject matter to help spice up your focus. One note about guest bloggers - make sure they agree to have their work edited by you before it's posted. A disagreement on this subject after the fact can have negative ramifications.
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I hate AdSense on blogs. Usually, I ignore it, but I also cast a sharp eye towards the quality of the posts and professionalism of the content when I see AdSense. That's not to say that contextual advertising can't work well in some blogs, but it needs to be well integrated into the design and layout to help defer criticism. Don't get me wrong - it's unfair to judge a blog by its cover (or, in this case, its ads), but spend a lot of time surfing blogs and you'll have the same impression - low quality blogs run AdSense and many high quality ones don't. I always recommend that whether personal or professional, you wait until your blog has achieved a level of success before you start advertising. Ads, whether they're sponsorships, banners, contextual or other, tend to have a direct, negative impact on the number of readers who subscribe, add to favorites and link - you definitely don't want that limitation while you're still trying to get established.
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Blogs that contain nothing but line after line of text are more difficult to read and less consistently interesting than those that offer images, interactive elements, the occasional multimedia content and some clever charts & graphs. Even if you're having a tough time with non-text content, think about how you can format the text using blockquotes, indentation, bullet points, etc. to create a more visually appealing and digestible block of content.
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In every niche, there are certain topics and questions that are frequently asked or pondered, but rarely have definitive answers. While this recommendation applies to nearly every content-based site, it's particularly easy to leverage with a blog. If everyone in the online Nascar forums is wondering about the components and cost of an average Nascar vehicle - give it to them. If the online stock trading industry is rife with questions about the best performing stocks after a terrorist threat, your path is clear. Spend the time and effort to research, document and deliver and you're virtually guaranteed link-worthy content that will attract new visitors and subscribers.
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Visitor tracking software can tell you which posts your audience likes best, which ones don't get viewed and how the search engines are delivering traffic. Use these clues to react and improve your strategies. Feedburner is great for RSS and I'm a personal fan of Indextools. Consider adding action tracking to your blog, so you can see what sources of traffic are bringing the best quality visitors (in terms of time spent on the site, # of page views, etc). I particularly like having the "register" link tagged for analytics so I can see what percentage of visitors from each source is interested enough to want to leave a comment or create an account.
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Charisma is a valuable quality, both online and off. Through a blog, it's most often judged by the voice you present to your users. People like empathy, compassion, authority and honesty. Keep these in the forefront of your mind when writing and you'll be in a good position to succeed. It's also critical that you maintain a level of humility in your blogging and stick to your roots. When users start to feel that a blog is taking itself too seriously or losing the characteristics that made it unique, they start to seek new places for content. We've certainly made mistakes (even recently) that have cost us some fans - be cautious to control not only what you say, but how you say it. Lastly - if there's a hot button issue that has you posting emotionally, temper it by letting the post sit in draft mode for an hour or two, re-reading it and considering any revisions. With the advent of feeds, once you publish, there's no going back.
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The best archives are carefully organized into subjects and date ranges. For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). Balance these two issues and make the decision based on your goals. A last note on archiving - pagination in blogging can be harmful to search traffic, rather than beneficial (as you provide constantly changing, duplicate content pages). Pagination is great for users who scroll to the bottom and want to see more, though, so consider putting a "noindex" in the meta tag or in the robots.txt file to keep spiders where they belong - in the well-organized archive system.
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The best URL structure for blogs is, in my opinion, as short as possible while still containing enough information to make an educated guess about the content you'll find on the page. I don't like the 10 hyphen, lengthy blog titles that are the byproduct of many CMS plugins, but they are certainly better than any dynamic parameters in the URL. Yes - I know I'm not walking the talk here, and hopefully it's something we can fix in the near future. To those who say that one dynamic parameter in the URL doesn't hurt, I'd take issue - just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we've worked with.
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The blogosphere is in love with the idea of an open source world on the web. Sharing vast stores of what might ordinarily be considered private information is the rule, rather than the exception. If you can offer content that's usually private - trade secrets, pricing, contract issues, and even the occasional harmless rumor, your blog can benefit. Make a decision about what's off-limits and how far you can go and then push right up to that limit in order to see the best possible effects. Your community will reward you with links and traffic.
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Not every post is worthy of making it to the top of Digg, Del.icio.us/popular or even a mention at some other blogs in your space. Trying to over-market every post you write will result in pushback and ultimately lead to negative opinions about your efforts. The less popular your blog is, the harder it will be to build excitement around a post, but the process of linkbait has always been trial and error - build, test, refine and re-build. Keep creating great ideas and bolstering them with lots of solid, everyday content and you'll eventually be big enough to where one out of every 20-40 posts really does become linkbait.
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When you're writing for your audience, your content focus, post timing and areas of interest will all become associated with your personal style. If you vary widely from that style, you risk alienating folks who've come to know you and rely on you for specific data. Thus, if you build a blog around the idea of being an analytical expert in your field, don't ignore the latest release of industry figures only to chat about an emotional issue - deliver what your readers expect of you and crunch the numbers. This applies equally well to post frequency - if your blog regularly churns out 2 posts a day, having two weeks with only 4 posts is going to have an adverse impact on traffic. That's not to say you can't take a vacation, but you need to schedule it wisely and be prepared to lose RSS subscribers and regulars. It's not fair, but it's the truth. We lose visitors every time I attend an SES conference and drop to one post every two days (note - guest bloggers and time-release posts can help here, too).
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Possibly one of the most important aspects of all in blogging is brand-building. As Zefrank noted, to be a great brand, you need to be a brand that people want to associate themselves with and a brand that people feel they derive value from being a member. Exclusivity, insider jokes, emails with regulars, the occasional cat post and references to your previous experiences can be off putting for new readers, but they're solid gold for keeping your loyal base feeling good about their brand experience with you. Be careful to stick to your brand - once you have a definition that people like and are comfortable with, it's very hard to break that mold without severe repercussions. If you're building a new blog, or building a low-traffic one, I highly recommend writing down the goals of your brand and the attributes of its identity to help remind you as you write.
Best of luck to all you bloggers out there. It's an increasingly crowded field to play in, but these strategies should help to give you an edge over the competition. As always, if you've got additions or disagreements, I'd love to hear them.
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