How to write a Press Release?

  The use of a press release is common in the field of public relations, the aim of which is to attract favorable media attention to public relations professional's client and/or provide publicity for products or events marketed by those clients. A press release provides reporters with the basics they need to develop a news story. Press releases can announce a range of news items such as: scheduled events, personal promotions, awards, news products and services, sales and other financial data, accomplishments, etc. Source: Wikipedia

While preparing the press releases and while researching for this article, I have found numerous examples of poorly written press releases that not only create headache but also serve as a barrier between you and your possible audience in your future press release. So choose your steps wisely and think well before sending out your press releases.

Understanding customer value and experience is vital in online business strategy. Companies that focus on short term sales rather than long term customer relations tend to loose their market share quickly. Gone are days of short sales cycles and quick purchases on e-commerce sites, customers are more conscious than ever. Here are some quick facts about customer behaviour online:

• 77% of online shoppers in the US actively seek out reviews before they buy* 

• 92% of shoppers find customer reviews “extremely helpful” or “very helpful” in making their decisions** 

• 97% said they trusted recommendations from peers* 

Source: Forrester, ** eTailing Group and JC Williams Consultancy

With this scenario in focus, we should try to influence the optimal customer behavior that will lead to win-win outcomes for your company and your customers.

I jsut read a very good post by ,Leo Babauta, on blogging basics. The post contains the content writing guidelines for bloggers, these are steps that should be taken care of while writing your posts.

Oh, and feel free to break any of these “rules”, as nothing is ever set in stone.

1. Write for the reader. This is the most fundamental of the fundamentals, and though this list isn’t in order of importance I’d be remiss if I didn’t start here. While a blog can be a personal journal, if you want an audience of more than your friends and family, write for an audience. Don’t just write about your random thoughts and experiences, but think of what the reader wants to know, what the reader’s concerns are, what the reader is interested in, and how you can help provide that.
2. Solve the reader’s problems. What are the reader’s problems? Solve them, one post at a time. To do this, I think about the problems I’ve been addressing in my own life, and as it turns out, most people have the same problems. I’m not as unique as I thought. And then I write about how I’ve been solving them — what actually works for me. People seem to find that useful.

Learn How To Create SEO Plan: Following are the steps that I think are crucial in any SEO plan or strategy. The article will a little longer than usual, but I believe it will be noteworthy and helpful to most of the people. Let's start the SEO plan.

Competitive Analysis:

Competitive analysis is one such step you should take in the very beginning of your SEO efforts. It should be right at the top of your to-do list, along with keyword analysis and tagging your web site. In fact, you should probably do a competitive analysis even before you begin tagging your site. Get a list of 3 of your major competitors and note the following points:

Site rankings:

• Page saturation: How many of the competition’s pages are indexed?
• Page titles
• Meta data
• Site design
• A robots.txt file
• Content quality and quantity
• Link quality and quantity

Although it is a first lesson in SEO, but believe me, as far as my experience is concerned, this is the lesson that most seo's learn in the last and the hard way i.e. after many failures. Remember the purpose of SEO is not to SPAM or Dodge search engines nor to fool the internet searcher. SEO is a very responsible task that requires deep thinking and long term focus, rather than short trem benefits. 

First Lesson: Know Your Audience

The fist and foremost thing that you should focus with all web-site design, the best objective for your site, is to help your visitors achieve a desired result, whether that’s purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter, or finding the desired information.

You should be able to answer these questions i.e. Why people are coming to our site? Where they are coming from? And what they do once they get there?

If you do not have clear answers for these yet, my advice is to forget everything for now and solve these seemingly innocent and easy but very diffult and core questions first.

How to boost Conversions-Ways to segment a market:

One of the major aspects of maximizing conversion rate is to make your marketing campaigns relevant to the audience. However, it should be always taken care that audience comes from numerous sources and a good marketer is always able to distinguish all of these channels or segments separately and designs an appropriate strategy for each segment. In this article we will explore some of the important ways to segment a market.

Landing page testing: The primary objective of landing page testing is to predict the behavior of your audience given the specific content on the landing page that they see. You will collect a limited sample of data during your test, summarize and describe it, and predict how people from the same traffic sources will act when interacting with the page. The ultimate goal is to find the best possible version of the landing page among all of the variations that you are testing.

Variable:

The word variable (when used by it) means a page element that you have selected. For example, a variable might be the headline of your landing page, or a whole-page redesign. In multivariate testing, a variable is also commonly referred to as a"factor"

Branching Factor:

The total number of possible values for a discrete variable is called its branching factor. The branching factor must be at least 2 (the original version and one alternative).

Recipe:

A recipe is a unique combination of variable values in your test.

Taguchi Testing Method:

Dr. Genichi Taguchi was the founder of Taguchi Testing Method, developed 50 years ago ,it is a statistical method originally used to optimize automobile and other product manufacturing. Recently, The Taguchi Method is being applied to Landing Page Optimization and is often regarded as “Multivariate Testing”

What is special about Taguchi and Multivariate Testing:

Multivariate testing has many different forms, depending on what you are trying to achieve. Taguchi testing is a subset of multivariate and is generally recognised to be the best place to start your calculations.

Usually with traditional A/B split tests you can test two versions of one variable, typical A/B split tests are limited to - headline A vs. headline B - or a price test among $99, $199 and $299 etc. Split testing is testing version A versus version B, if we explain it simply.

Forrester has recently introduced a new social media research tool for Internet Marketeers. It enables a very good combination of demographic & geographic filtration of online audience. II is also ideal for marketeers willing to place adds on social media networks, must check it out below:

For those who are unfamiliar with .htaccess file, here is  the basic info:

 .htaccess (hypertext access) is the default name of a directory-level configuration file that allows for decentralized management of web server configuration. The .htaccess file is placed inside the web tree, and is able to override a subset of the server's global configuration; the extent of this subset is defined by the web server administrator.The original purpose of .htaccess was to allow per-directory access control (e.g. requiring a password to access the content), hence the name. Nowadays .htaccess can override many other configuration settings, mostly related to content control, e.g. content type and character set, CGI handlers, etc.

Following are some basic tips and uses of .htaccess file, I think every webmaster should at least have an idea of the power and usefulness of .htaccess file.