You spend time and money building an online presence for your brand. You make sure that the website is beautifully designed and optimized for search engines. You may have even paid for advertisements leading potential clients to your website.

But when your domain name is expiring, are you renewing it promptly?

In today’s news, Straits Times reported that Singapore citizens were unable to pay for all kinds of government services such as season parking tickets, passports, road tax, etc. on Tuesday because eNets went down for 11 hours.

What happened was that Nets failed to renew their domain name on time.

The company had to re-register its enets.sg Web address by midnight before it expired. But the renewal did not appear on a national registry of domain names until late Tuesday morning.

While domain name renewals are usually instantaneous, we should not assume that this is a given because domain name renewals are dependent on Domain Name Registrars. Most Domain Name Registrars send email notifications to their clients when their domain names are expiring within 30 days.

So how do you avoid repeating the same mistake as Nets?

Personally, I would suggest renewing your domain names the moment you receive an email notification from your Domain Name Registrar regarding the expiry of your domain name. For domain names that you will be retaining for years, consider renewing them for longer terms, around 2 to 5 years.

If you have a method of managing your domain names, I would love to hear from you. Please share them in the comments below.

Photo credits: annaOMline

We know companies are jumping on the social media bandwagon but very often, the person who is delegated with the task to post updates on social media networks is not trained on understanding how digital marketing works. As a result, they are posting updates when they are at work instead of when their audience is listening.

As a top digital marketing strategist, you need to understand that you need to time posts to achieve the maximum engagement. But when are your target audience most receptive?

Argyle Social inspected a segment of its customer data -- 250K posts and 5M clicks -- to see if they could identify aggregate trends. Here is an infographic based on their findings.

As digital marketers, some of us may not necessarily be working at a fixed location. In fact, I would prefer to get work done in a coffee place, with a hot cup of Chai Tea latte.

Previously, I’ve shared with you 10 rules to be a responsible mobile worker in cafes based on WorkSnug’s study. In this post, let’s talk about the ultimate mobile office setup for digital marketers.

Hardware

I love my trusty Lenovo Thinkpad X200i. It’s been with me for more than a year now but it’s still working great! I like how it’s small and light. However, I love  As a digital marketer, I prefer to use a Windows platform over Mac simply because 80% of my clients’ target audience uses a Windows computer to visit clients’ websites.

Accompanying my laptop is my Microsoft Arc Touch mouse which is really slim when switched off.

Software

I’m using the Windows 7 operating system which is an excellent improvement over the Windows Vista.

Software that I use in my digital marketing work include:

• All major browsers (Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox)
• Microsoft Office
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe Dreamweaver
• Adobe Flash
• Notepad
• Skype (for overseas calls)
• Hoiio (for local calls)
• WS FTP

The reason why my list of software is relatively short is because I rely quite a fair bit of cloud tools.

Additional gadgets

There are times when having everything on the Internet is just not good enough for clients. Legal departments would always want real signatures in contracts. Designers want high resolution photos that cannot be captured with mobile phones. They also want to be impressed by a nice presentation on a tablet (even when they don’t say so).

That’s why I carry the following arsenal in my bag at times:

• Sony Nex-5 camera
• Apple iPad (with my Jot Pro stylus and VGA adapter)

I would like to think that I don’t carry a lot of things with me each time, but the weight still feels heavy on the shoulder. Perhaps I need to get a backpack soon.

What do you carry with you to work everyday? Please share them with me in the comments below.

Photo credit: blueace

I am an enthusiast (or sound like a broken record) when it comes to the use of Google Analytics. For all my clients, I always ask them if they are using Google Analytics whenever they want to engage my service. The reason is simple. Google Analytics is a FREE tool provided by Google to allow you to track what’s happening to your website and analyse it later with statistics.

Without statistics to tell you how your website is performing, how would you know if your marketing strategies are working?

In my role, many people consult me to get digital marketing solutions for their marketing campaigns. In many occasions, my first question to them is, how do you determine if your campaign is a success? Success could be determined by the percentage of increase in online sales, or the number of downloads of a free e-book?

In most cases, Google Analytics can provide a measurable metric to help determine if their campaign is successful or not.

After months of procrastinating, I finally took the time to take the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) certification and managed to pass on my first attempt. Personally, I must say it was pretty hard because in order to pass, you must attain a score of 80% and above.

So why am I spending time and money to obtain this certification?

The Google Analytics Individual Qualification is a proof of proficiency in Google Analytics that is available to any individual who has passed the Google Analytics IQ test. With a passing grade of 80% or more you can get recognized as a person qualified as a Google Analytics Individual Expert.

To show my clients that I am committed to provide them with digital marketing solutions that are measurable for success and on top of that, I have the necessary knowledge to make that happen.

Let me give you an example. I had a client from the Food & Beverage (F&B) industry who was approached by a vendor who wanted to provide Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service. Fortunately, I have been consulting this client for four years and we have integrated his websites with Google Analytics since Day 1. Now if he were to engage that vendor who says that they can improve his websites’ search ranking, I can tell him that he can go ahead and engage this vendor and we can measure if the SEO campaign is successful or not by comparing website statistics generated during the campaign with past performance with Google Analytics. On top of that, we can create conversion goals to gauge specific performance.

If you require any consultation on I can help you measure your campaign for success, please feel free to contact me to discuss further.

Photo credits: Ralphandjenny

Are you still publishing press releases to the media in traditional text formats?

These days, journalists and editors are flooded with so many press releases that they stop thinking of an angle to write about the corporate news in your press release. If your press release does not have the necessary information and additional details to help them with their article, they will move on to the next press release in their inbox.

PR Newswire leveraged on Crowd Factory’s social analytics to reveal new insights into social engagement around press releases. Here’s an infographic based on their insights and I hope you will find them useful.

“The more we learn the more we realize how little we know.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

This blog post is part of a 3-part series about the key learning points that I have learnt from three veterans Certified Speaking Professionals.

Roundtable with Scott Friedman: Engaging your Audience through Humour and Storytelling

As a speaker we come from one of three places

1. Self-centric:
2. Content-centric:
3. Audience-centric:

Make it about your audience.

Planning your speaking engagement

Do not prepare the contents of your presentation for a full session. This is because you will not have time to incorporate humour in your speech when you are trying to cover everything in your presentation. Scott advises to plan your contents to take up two-third of the session.

Understand your audience. When taking on a speaking engagement, ask the hirer who will be in your audience and how conservative are they. It’s fun to add humour to a presentation but it wouldn’t be fun if you are speaking to a conservative crowd who gets offended by your jokes. If you understand your audience and know how they are feeling, you can make use of a commonality that everyone shares and really connect with your audience.

Adding humour into your speeches

Scott highlighted two key points about the use of humour.

1. You need to give yourself permission to have fun before your audience can have fun.
2. It’s okay to make fun of yourself to make the audience laugh, but it is not cool to poke fun at others and embarrass them.

Using stories in your speeches

The easiest way to tell a story in your speech is to use your own life experience because it’s authentic and you don’t have to think too hard to build the content. While creating the story, you must make sure that it is something your audience is able to relate to. Once you are done creating the story, reduce the number of words you need to complete the story to half. Scott emphasised that, in storytelling, less is more.

A quick tip from Scott

Most of the time speakers fail to deliver a good story to their audience because of the way they convey their punch lines. You need to pause before delivering the punch line to let your audience absorb your story and ready themselves for the punch line. Then, deliver your punch line. After delivering your punch line, pause again to let your audience absorb and comprehend your punch line. If the story is meant to be funny and nobody seems to be laughing, you will have to close off the story yourself, for example, you can bow your head down and say, “Please take a moment and bow your head in silence for the joke that just died here.

“The more we learn the more we realize how little we know.” -- R. Buckminster Fuller

On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to attend an exclusive roundtable sessions with 8 Certified Speaking Professionals (CSP) organised by the Asia Professional Speakers Singapore (APSS). Everyone had the opportunity to have a roundtable session with 3 CSPs for 20 minutes each.

This blog post is part of a 3-part series about the key learning points that I have learnt from these three veterans.

Roundtable with Nishant Kasibhatla: Top Do’s and Don’ts in Building Your Speaking Business

Visibility

It is important to maintain visibility with your target audience. Traditional media is still very much alive when it comes to branding. Getting on radio, television interviews, and writing newspaper articles has scored Nishant many paid speaking engagements. As for online media, maintain a website and regular newsletter to keep your clients updated about your activities.

Consider submitting articles to high ranking article directories such EzineArticles will also create more backlinks to your website to improve search engine optimization and help to generate more buzz about you when readers find your articles in these directories.

Motivation

Starting your own speaking business can be daunting because most speakers work from home and it can be difficult to keep yourself motivated and grow the business facing the four walls in your room with no one to talk to.

Here are some of the tips Nishant shared based on his own experience.

1. Identify the top 5 goals that you want to achieve in your life. Pen them down on a piece of paper and place it on your desk so that you will see it everyday.
2. Dedicate a minimum of 4 hours of work each day. Nishant recommends spending 60% of the time on marketing, 30% of the time on product development, and 10% of the time on administrative matters. This way, you are spending less time working than an employee and will put in more effort in those few hours.
3. Invite fellow speakers to hear you speak and critic your presentation so that you can improve.

Products

It’s not as difficult as you thought to create your first product. For example, if you maintain a blog, you can can make use of a top 10 tip article that you may have written previously as the foundation of your product and elaborate on it.

Sales

For a new speaker, Nishant recommends to start free. Just speak as much as possible to gain experience and improve. While it is important to please the audience and the person who hired you for the speaking engagement, it is even more important to impress the boss of the person who hired you. That increases the chances of getting speaking engagements in future.

After each speaking engagement, always ask for testimonials. While not all clients will be willing to take some time to write a testimonial for you, it never hurts to ask. You should also log your speaking engagements. Once you have at least 1-2 years of log, you will then be able to gauge if you are doing better for a specific month as compared to the same month a year ago.

A quick tip from Nishant

Nishant shared a tip about prospecting. Most people will start planning for their holidays in November and December. But these are one of the best months to prospect your existing clients because these are the months where department heads want to finish their excess budget for the year. A training workshop will be just nice to help balance the budget. Even if the budget for the year has been used up, it’s great to prospect to keep you at your clients’ top of mind so that they can try to set some budget aside for the following year for some of your training sessions.

The Google Analytics team has announced that they are now providing real-time statistics on the new version of Google Analytics.

Check out the video below by Darren Rowse on his view about this new feature.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRflt4nv9MM

For those who have worked with me before, Google Analytics is my must-have for every website that I have created.

The reason is simple. You should never be marketing your products and services online without preparing tools to measure if your efforts are successful or not. Without measuring metrics, there’s no way you can tell if you are doing the right things, or are you just lucky when sales are generated during the period of your marketing campaign.

However, the only way to know if you are tracking the campaigns correctly is to check Google Analytics the next day to see the statistics. This is because Google Analytics only provide statistics of your website, one day later.

With the new Google Analytics Real-Time, a new set of reports are now available for you to see what’s happening as it happens.

So what’s changed? Well for a start, the moment you send out a new tweet or post a Facebook status update about a new product or service, you can monitor the impact on your website the very second.

When you create a new campaign or goal conversion metric, you can immediately test to see if it’s working properly before you start marketing to your target audience.

Google Analytics Real-Time is now available when you click on the hyperlink called New Version on the top right of your Dashboard to activate the new version of your Google Analytics to  use Google Analytics Real-Time.

Do you have any thoughts on Google Analytics Real-Time? Share them with me in the comments below.

Photo credits: Brooks Elliott

“The more we learn the more we realize how little we know.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

This blog post is part of a 3-part series about the key learning points that I have learnt from three veterans Certified Speaking Professionals.

Roundtable with Andrew Bryant: Being a Speaker of Value

It is important to understand the fact that not everyone who wants to be a speaker, will become a speaker eventually. It is a competitive industry out there.

Realizing your value

Who are you? What is your value? What is important about you? These are three important questions that you need to ask yourself.

Andrew shared an online resource that you can use to identify your value. Visit viacharacter.org and take the free VIA Inventory of Strengths Survey. At the end of the survey, you will receive a free VIA Me! Character Strengths Profile, identifying what are your top character and strengths. Take some time to narrow down your list of values and strengths down to three each. After that, work on making use of these values and strengths in your speaking personality.

Another way to realize your value is to make use of what you afraid of. Fear can motivate you to succeed. Speakers are also able to connect with their audience much better when they share their fears and how they overcome them.

Adding value to your clients

The big question in every speaker’s mind is, “how do I add value to my clients?”

Just ask them! In every speaking engagement, you should ask your client what they want to achieve or learn at the end of the event. In most cases, your clients will have a rough idea what they want when they engage you for your services.

Once you know what your clients want, research about the subject to create the content value needed for your presentation.

Next, connect your presentation to your clients’ problems and provide recommendations and solutions.

By achieving this, you can be sure that your clients will walk away happy at the end of the event.

If you are given a budget to help a company build an online lead generation strategy, what would you be spending most of the money on?

That’s probably the biggest question in your mind right now, especially with the wide variety of tools available at your disposal. Should you be running search engine marketing campaigns? Build a Facebook fan page? Create a company LinkedIn page?

Webmarketing123 has published a digital marketing report based on a survey of over 500 marketing professionals from both B2B and B2C. I’m sharing the infographic that they created based on the survey results.

Have you achieved success in building an online lead generation strategy? Please share them with me in the comments below.