Top 3 Reasons to use LinkedIn Answers

by OMLogic Team on September 23, 2008

LinkedIn AnswersLinkedIn Answers is one of the most powerful and under utilized Professional Networking tools available today. Here are my take on top 3 reasons to leverage LinkedIn Answers.

1. FREE Expert Advice: Obviously, the most common reason to use LinkedIn Answers is to get free advice. Almost contrary (you still need to put effort to ask the question ☺) to “there is no free lunch”, LinkedIn Answers offers an awesome opportunity to get valuable answers from experts. So far, I’ve asked 4 questions on LinkedIn and without exception I’ve always received tremendous response from industry experts. My recent question “Are you a blogger? Did you reach your 100th post milestone?” has already received close to 30 answers.

2. Build Your Professional Network: Your participation (either asking the question or providing the answer) on LinkedIn Answers is guaranteed to support you in enriching and growing your professional network at LinkedIn. Coinciding with my asking questions on LinkedIn, I’ve always received invitation requests from other industry experts from across the world. LinkedIn Answers must have contributed significantly to my crossing 500+ strong professional network on LinkedIn.

3. Contribute to Your Network: Without this reason, the above two values offered by LinkedIn Answers won’t exist. Share your knowledge and contribute to your professional network by answering questions in areas of your expertise. You don’t just get the satisfaction of contributing to others profession but also stand to grow your network and take your expertise to the next level (teaching is still the best way to learn).

So, what are waiting for? Don’t tell me that you don’t have questions for which are looking at expert advice. How about experiencing the power of LinkedIn Answers yourself?

Please do add your reasons to use LinkedIn Answers.

For those of you who are yet to take the plunge on LinkedIn, I recommend checking out “Ten Ways to use LinkedIn” by Guy Kawasaki and “LinkedIn in Plain English’ Video:

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How we enjoy success at OMLogic?

by Kapil Gupta on September 19, 2008

We have always had a simple philosophy on running OMLogic: Our customers should know OMLogic as the experts in Online Marketing and the most hard working team and we should execute flawlessly, making us the leaders. But our employees and potential employees should recognize us as the company with the best and most fun loving work environment.

To that extent, we set some targets for OMLogic to achieve, and to celebrate the last success we had a team party last Saturday (13-9-08). The party consisted of the entire OMLogic team with families and was a full day affair at the Best Western Country Club near Gurgaon, the finest resort in and around Delhi that I have seen so far.

So far I knew that the OMLogic Team worked hard. Last week I got to know the other side, they party hard as well. :-)

Rain Dance

From the left: Kapil Nakra, Aaliyah Gupta (holding Kapil Gupta's hand), 
Hridya Chopra (in Pradeep Chopra's arms), Umrao Singh and Raj Digari

The day started late with a nice lunch get together on the way to the country club, and ended with a sumptuous late-dinner, and consisted of an event packed day:

- Camel and horse riding. It was great to see the camel sitting down and the scary looks on the riders when it did. It was my second experience riding a camel (first of my adult life) and I throughly enjoyed the scary moments.
- Racing in the pool: Everyone got in the pool and showed their prowess.
- Rain Dance (SOBER)
- A game of Housie (where our lucky guy Pradeep Chopra won first house out of a group of 200 people)
- Dance to the bollywood tunes (In the Bar)

Overall the team had great fun. Just one of the ways we make OMLogic a great place to work.

We are always looking for more ideas on making our work environment more fun filled and enjoyable for everyone around. We will appreciate your comments with these ideas.

We are always looking for good people, so please visit Careers @ OMLogic for available career opportunities with OMLogic, or send a mail to info@omlogic.com

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The Art of (Not) Writing Title & Descriptions for SEO

by OMLogic Team on August 4, 2008

Given the socially networked world today, all of us understand the importance of writing catchy headlines. That is why you need to pay attention to the headlines you write in any of your web pages.

However, search engines are even more interested in the Title Tag, the text that appears in the top of the screen in most of the browsers. You will know this when you ask any reasonably good Search Engine Optimizer. They will also tell you that the Description Meta Tag also contributes to the SEO performance of any web page. However, the sad part is most of these SEOs don’t look beyond stuffing keywords in these tags.

Take a moment and answer this question:

What makes you decide to click on a particular result when you search on Google?

I hope you answered ‘Title’ or ‘Description’ (or the combination). If you didn’t then please do a search for something and observe the results you click.

Given that ‘Title’ and ‘Description’ play a critical role in people clicking on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), you would want to take utmost care in writing the content for these tags. Your SEO results are like Ads for your webpage. Have you ever thought that similar to PPC, the SEO results for your website competes with the results of your competitors.

You may not be ranked 1st on Google for a desired keyword, still you can acquire more (and relevant) traffic (reminds you of CTR?) to your website than the site which is 1st. Provided, the content you write in the Title and Description tags is relevant to the searchers. To breakdown ‘relevancy’ further, I would recommend asking yourself the following questions, while you are writing Title and Description tags for your web pages:

1. Are you addressing the concerns of your customers? For e.g. if your customers are looking for high quality or a low cost, mention how your product or service offers the same. Like an Ad, putting numbers work better than an abstract text.
2. Are you persuading the searcher to take the desired action? For e.g. if you are looking at getting people try your product for free, do mention the same, especially in the way that ‘you are calling them for action’.
3. Is your copy optimized for SEO? While ensuring the above points, do not forget to optimize your tags for SEO – in other words, do include the keywords in your tags. Otherwise you will not even get the chance to benefit from the above ☺.

Look at the following search results (in the actual order they appear) when a PMP (Project Management Professional) certification aspirant searches for ‘pmp certification‘ on Google.

SEO Title and Descriptions

Don’t you think that the 3rd result is likely to drive more clicks than the 2nd result, which in turn is likely to drive more traffic than the 1st?

Since Google will only display around first 60 characters of your Title tag and first 155 characters of your Description meta tag, please ensure that you are addressing the above questions within the given limits. And, most of the times, it will require you to be creative. So, when you are looking for hiring an SEO professional, don’t forget to add ‘creativity’ as one of the key skills.

I hope this piece of advice contributes to your website traffic. I will appreciate your feedback and comments

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OMLogic’s SEM Success Story for a B2B Business in the Making

by OMLogic Team on July 16, 2008

Challenge Client was facing:
In Nov 2007, a leading IT Services Company contacted OMLogic to support them in increasing the number of relevant leads they receive from Online Marketing efforts. From last 2 years they had been trying out various options to achieve this objective. They also outsourced online marketing to other digital advertising agencies. As a result, they were able to increase the traffic significantly but there was no improvement in the number of relevant leads received every month. To achieve the next level of growth they were looking for some organization to help them in increasing both the number as well as the quality of leads.

Our Analysis:
We started working with them in clearly defining all the customer segments they were targeting and the value proposition offered to each customer segment. We audited the user experience for each customer segment individually. As a result of our analysis, we concluded that the existing keywords were not targeting the relevant traffic. Moreover, the landing page communication was confusing and it was not taking care of all the customer concerns.

Our Solution:
We picked up one customer segment for which online marketing is most aptly suited for lead generation. Customer segment was “Companies looking for Staff Augmentation services.”

We worked with them in identifying the right message for their value proposition and supported them in designing the whole marketing communication as per the identified message including text ads, image ads and landing micro-sites.

We reworked on the search profiling, identified new set of relevant keywords and introduced images ads supported by Google content network campaign.

Result:
We launched the new campaign in February and achieved exceptional results within the first month of launch. Overall traffic grew by 255% from the google search network alone.

Moreover, with improved messaging we were able to maintain the same lead to traffic conversion for the increased traffic. The number of leads increased to 2.5 times the initial level in just couple of months.

With our improved measurability, we were able to analyze all traffic and concluded that the content network was generating irrelevant leads and we stopped it completely, which significantly increased the overall ROI.

Next Challenge we are working on:

Currently, we are dealing with the challenge that the leads generated from online marketing are from the small size organization. The client wants to move up the value chain to large deal size leads. In order to take care of this concern we are launching another marketing campaign suited for high-end customers.

If anyone has any suggestions in this regard, I will appreciate if you could pass on your comments.

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OMLogic’s Differentiated SEO Approach: Part 1

by Kapil Gupta on May 27, 2008

At OMLogic, we implement Online Marketing for our clients with a holistic approach. We strongly believe that for any business, whether a new one or an established one, online marketing only works when it is aligned with organization’s business objectives and is in sync with its fundamental marketing strategy.

We start with a complete and thorough understanding of our customer’s marketing strategy and then apply our expertise in online marketing to layout an optimal framework and roadmap for their business. During this phase, we also build basic framework for SEO (on-page and off-page optimization strategy, KW Research, Tags Creation, Title creation, content overview, filenames/URL’s, page structure and templates). Our framework helps us get key insights into our customers business, and implement SEO that doesn’t just get more traffic to the website, but really impacts our customer’s business objective.

Example: Recently, I had a customer with a global customer base and most of the revenue coming from India, US and Europe. They contacted OMLogic Consulting with an urgent issue in their Online Marketing Implementation, specifically their Search Engine Optimization. Their organic traffic had fallen off 25% in the last 6 months, and being a B2C business, which has significant dependence on SEM (SEO/PPC) driving new potential customers, this lower traffic was severely impacting sales. They hadn’t done much SEO work over the last 6 months, and they perceived that as impacting rankings for them across the globe.

OMLogic took the same holistic approach to SEO analysis work. Initially OMLogic engaged in a deep-dive fact-finding and assessment work. During this phase OMLogic evaluated their Business Model and Business Objectives, Competitive Landscape, Marketing Communication and Messaging, Current Online Presence and SEO Compliance, and Measurability. OMLogic also conducted a detailed Keyword Analysis for them.
The results were very different from the Problem statement as laid out by the customer, and surprised both OMLogic and them. Below were the key findings:

** Keyword Analysis: After performing a complete evaluation, we determined that the customer was using KW’s that they wanted their customers to use while searching for them, which were very different than how the customer was actually looking for them. Their product name had words which were seldom used by the customer. We recommended changing the product name. This unleashed a huge opportunity for the customer to drive relevant traffic to their website.

** Traffic Analysis: Customer came with the issue that their traffic was down due to no SEO work. After our analysis, we determined that the customer’s traffic over the last 6 months was down 65% across the globe (excluding India), and the traffic was up 10% in India. So, the changes in traffic were geography based and not global. Customer ranks were very low in US (not even in top-100 for most KW’s), and much higher in India (top 20 ranks for almost all relevant KW’s).

We now had the framework for their implementation, which was focused primarily on targeting the right KW’s (thereby ensuring right traffic) and doing extensive geo-targeting for US customer base. This ensured we remained laser focused on performing the right actions which could get results for our client.

In the next post we will talk about specific actions we took in geo-targeting, and the impact they had on our customer’s business.

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OMLogic Completes 1st Year: Thank You!

by Kapil Gupta on May 9, 2008

Online Marketing ConsultingWe are extremely pleased to announce successful completion of OMLogic’s first year. On May 9th, 2007, we embarked on an unknown journey to build a successful “Online Marketing Enterprise” and to help businesses “Go Global”, and today is the culmination of its first milestone.

We would like to Thank You for your continued support and for your well wishes during the last one year, and for years to come.

Last one year has been a remarkable journey, filled with adventure, and we enter the next year with the same enthusiasm and passion we had on the day one. We started this journey with the objective of working everyday on things we are passionate about – online marketing and building businesses. We are happy to share that OMLogic has provided us the platform we needed to fulfill our passions and dreams. We have successfully created a sound framework for relevant traffic generation and relevant conversion, which has helped achieve transformational results for our customers. Please visit Our Successes to see what they have to say.

We would also like to announce the launch of our updated website. Please visit the same for more and latest information about OMLogic and our team. We have built this website with the same vigor and enthusiasm that we put into all of our customers’ work, and would really appreciate your feedback. Please leave us a word of encouragement, adulation, suggestion or most valuable of all – constructive criticism and ideas for improvement.

Once again, thanks to all of you for supporting us in pursuing our passion. Looking forward to your continuous support and your best wishes for the future!

Best wishes,
Pradeep Chopra

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The Power of Being Online – Voice of the Customer

by OMLogic Team on February 16, 2008

Voice of the CustomerAmong various benefits internet offers to its users, “Voice of the customer” is one of the most powerful tools. The notion “Customer is the King” is absolute reality in the internet age. Let me share a recent real life incident in which I personally experienced the power of being online.

Last year I bought a new Apple MacBook and I was very happy & excited when I started using it. Unfortunately, I faced multiple breakdowns – first battery crash, then data crash followed by hard disk failure. Even worse, I received horrible customer service from Apple’s service center in Delhi. More than the valuable data, I lost precious time fighting with Apple India. But they were reluctant to hear. Being an Online Marketing service provider, I thought of taking a different approach – instead of me going after them (push), let me create a pull towards me.

I authentically shared my experience of Apple MacBook and Apple India’s service at:
- Apple India Sucks (MouthShut)
- Apple India Sucks (CNet Reviews)

As expected, I got a call from them. They apologized for my experience and offered me a brand new and the next version of the laptop as the compensation. Although I didn’t want to but I finally accepted their request. Looking at the comments, view/read stats and the popularity of the above mentioned sites, I am sure that Apple paid a heavy price for the mistake of not listening to their customer. Since I’d given my email id in the review, I am receiving mails from people asking for my advice on whether they should buy Apple machine. Virtually, I am driving (or preventing) a part (however small it is) of their sales.

What lessons did I learn (equally applicable for you) from this experience?
1. My voice matters – As a customer, I am much more powerful today than ever before. I can and should demand the respect and service I expect from my vendors.

2. Customer is the king – As a business owner, I can’t ignore the voice of my customer or I will pay a very high price. Given the networked world (socially and professionally) today, it pays to be honest.

I can correlate this strongly to my previous venture in which we used to serve IT professionals who were strongly connected to each other through various discussion forums relevant to our services. Occasionally (especially in the very beginning of our venture), some people would say negative about our product/service. Instead of taking that as a feedback and an opportunity to grow, we used to defend ourselves by giving counter response. Till the moment we acknowledged our mistake, the problem would only grow. The moment my customer got the experience of being listened to, the discussion will end.

The same happened in this experience with Apple. The moment they called me I stopped thrashing them and when they again faltered I went out against them. This idea of writing a blog post about my experience serves two purposes – first, sharing the lessons I learnt with you and second, making Apple India realize the importance of customer service.

3. Pull always works better than Push – Whether you are selling or buying a product/service, pull always beat push. In the online world, pull is not only more effective but also more feasible.

I hope you find this experience valuable. Please do give your inputs and feel free to share any such experience you might have had in the past.

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Careers in Online Marketing

by OMLogic Team on January 2, 2008

In 2007, OMLogic started OM Careers, a non-profit, online marketing careers community, dedicated to addressing the challenge of lack of skilled resources in the Online/Search marketing industry, and becoming a unique contact-point for everything you need to know about Online Marketing. On Jan 12, OM Careers is playing host to world’s first online marketing careers conference in Delhi on Jan 12, 2008.

The event will be coupled with a unique job clinic opportunity for people who are interested in building a successful career in the online marketing industry and for organizations that are interested in hiring right OM talent.

In addition, it will be a great opportunity for individuals and businesses to network with India’s leading online marketing companies and experts.

We would love to have you participate in the event. More important, we seek your support in promoting this event and making it a great success! It would be great if you could spread the word about this event to your friends and associates.

The event details can be found at http://conference.omcareers.org and you can register online at http://conference.omcareers.org/reg.asp.

Do add your name to the participants list, if you plan to attend this event.

Looking forward to seeing you at the event !!

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Welcome to the wide world of OMLogic !!

by Kapil Gupta on December 19, 2007

Hello Everyone,

I am Kapil Gupta, one of the Founders of OMLogic Consulting, and I welcome you to OMLogic’s corporate blog. I will be boring you with all the exciting stuff that goes on at OMLogic.

We are a bunch of very dedicated people who come from diverse background and got into the business of providing online marketing services. We understand “Online Behavior and excel in “Taking Businesses Online” …

SOOOO…. BORRRRING !!!

I know, I know.. Most of you are thinking that this info is available on our website, why the heck do we put it on our Blog..

I got it, and will stop.

I will start this blog by introducing our team, you can read all the boring stuff about us on our website (Our People), I will only talk about the interesting stuff here. We have 1 Suresh, 2 Kapil’s and 1 Pradeep:

Suresh Arora: Think before you act. You should know the next 10 steps before you embark on a journey.

Kapil Nakra: How will I know the next 10 steps till I don’t take the 1st step. Let me just dip my feet in water, and feel it. But wait. Before you go, make sure you don’t end up making a small company. I only want to make a big company. STOP.. Lets think more !!

Kapil Gupta: Boring.. Lets just move. You wanna plan, go plan.. You wanna move, go move.. Just don’t bore me.

Pradeep Chopra: These guys will just keep talking.. Endlessly. I got work to do.
While you guys finish your discussions and arguments I will get couple of clients and come back.

In the next post, I will talk about how we started OMLogic.. Keep coming, and keep the comments going..

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