Don’t make it appear cheap

Many interested travelers may avoid your airline considering your service, ambience, and appearance, crowd as cheap and uncomfortable. Your first job is to make sure the word ‘cheap’ is not attached to your brand. An airline being affordable for its customers does not necessarily mean to be cheap and uncomfortable. Make sure it is just affordable, but not cheap. Make sure people feel at ease, feel special and well served like any good airline. Keep appearance and ambience of the airlines great, pleasing, posh, and nice. Keep pleasant looking air hosts and hostesses who are courteous, helpful. No one wants to travel in a cheap manner.

Serve more than they expect

Definitely, being a low cost airline you cannot afford to offer all frills and fancies of a full cost airline. But at the same time, serve more than the customers expect from you. This will keep your customers excited about your service, spreading good words about you everywhere. Surprise them with little more than others. Take an extra leap, go an extra mile to get more customers, keep customers happy and loyal to your brand. Being low cost, you may not provide food, but you may offer some water and fruit juices, coffee, chocolates and French fries unlike other airlines. It may cost you little more than others, but will give you an edge too. You may keep some wonderful travel magazines of the concerned destination. You may highlight some shopping tips.

Attractive offers

Since there are many low cost airlines these days, you should be different and remembered for some good reason. Offer some lucrative deals like heavy discount on early booking reserved for first 20 customers or lucky draw coupon for a free trip or gifts for a couple travelling together, free holiday guidebooks for a family of 4 members travelling together to a holiday destination.

Get set go. Fly with pride.

Display great designs

Unless you show caliber of your tattoo designing, people will not acknowledge your talent. Thus, start displaying various tattoo designs done by you. Show a variety of designs – including things like floral patterns, animals, birds, religious and spiritual symbols, numerical, various fonts of various languages, skeletons, dragons etc.

Talk about hygiene, scientific approach

Many people stay away from tattooing in fear of lack of hygiene, safety and the like. You need to reassure those people by illustrating in detail the scientific hygienic method adopted for tattoo job. Bring confidence in your target audience by narrating the process in all your communication strategies. Reassure them of the painless effort taken by your specialists with 100% hygienic procedure.

Temporary tattoo can bring customers

Many permanent tattoo artists do not take temporary tattoo much easily, considering it as an amateur job done for less experimental people. Don’t do this mistake. With nice attractive temporary tattoos you are not only lowering one tier of your customers and roping in business, but you are also seducing them with your expertise. If the customer leaves satisfied, may come back again and consider permanent ones too. Make sure you inform them about permanent ones and show some good designs. Offer discount for early booking.

Reach out youngsters

Do not ignore the youth, they are your customers. Appeal them, persuade them. You may put up your shop’s advertisements, posters in places where youngsters are frequent to like – coffee shop, ice cream parlor, gymnasium, sports clubs, movie theatre, shopping malls, pubs, dance clubs, amusement parks. You may also provide some percentage of discounts for couples getting it done together. You may offer special discount on Valentine’s Day.

Testimonials

Make real people – your past and present group of satisfied customers do the marketing job for you. Quote their feedback. If you have a celebrity customer that’s even better, that’s like an icing on cake.

Travel, travel and travel

For a travel writer flight, hotel room, jungle camp, train, cruise is more like a home, a comfort zone as he is mostly travelling. It has no other substitute. You can’t write about a place in a good manner unless you have experienced it yourself. You will miss out many points if you have not been through that. So just, go out and experience the world. Know folks, culture, cuisine, customs, and lifestyle of a place. Even if you don’t understand their language, you can get hold of its pulse.

A new perspective

Write from a new perspective with fresh findings. As most of the places are talked about, written about in all travel magazines and portals it’s difficult to find a new place altogether. Instead you may find something new about the same place and write from a new point of view altogether. As for example, you may do research on tribes of a particular place and talk about their origin, lifestyle and attachment with the place. You may trace origin of a city’s road construction history and write on the same in a vivid interesting way.

Travel reporting

Remember, a travel writer is different from a tourist. Travel writer is doing travel journalism, but in a creative manner. While you travel and visit places take notes, ask questions to the local folks and supervisors of places, know expenses of places, observe lifestyle, check public transport, taste food, know climatic conditions. You may also quote a person in your writing. The more real is your writing better travel writer you are. Learn to capture sight, sound, smell – in a nutshell essence of the place in your writing.

Read extensively

You can’t write well if you don’t read much. Start reading. Read other travel writers to know what sells, what makes a travel write up popular and a masterpiece. Pay attention to the style of writing, technical aspects of writing etc. Apart from travel books, read history, geography.

Start writing. Start travelling.

Content has to be powerful

Newsletter is totally dependent on its content and its relevance. Know what you wish to say, followed by the art of saying it. Know what you wish to convey in a specific month of the year. Suppose you are a restaurant owner and you wish to promote your mocktails during summer, then convey the same in that month’s newsletter. Pick up a topic each month and relate it to your product or service.

Know your audience

Define you target audience before starting with your newsletter. Know demography, psychographic construct of you audience. Knowing more about them will help you to develop content of the newsletter while keeping tone, manner, and mood of the newsletter apt. Suppose you are selling an anti-ageing crème to the middle aged women, you should know how to approach them, what should be your style of communication and the like. You can’t afford to lose their interest because of inappropriate style.

Claims come with research

Don’t make big claims without supporting source of facts. Do ample research before making statements. This way you will not land up into problems too. Include facts, statistics, graphs, expert opinions, quotes supporting your research. Such data always build credibility. But don’t forget to mention the source.

Interesting heading

It’s good headlines which instantly draw attention towards the newsletter. Make sure the headline is extremely hard hitting and catchy, evoking curiosity. To make newsletter easy to read break the content into few paragraphs with sub headings.

Audience friendly lingo

Make sure your newsletter has audience friendly, easily comprehensive language, which people can relate to. Avoid technical jargons, too long sentences.

Proofread is important

A newsletter filled with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes is highly avoided. Apart from the writer, ask someone else to do the job. Mistakes show writer’s lack of concern, interest, and unprofessionalism. If a brand is laughed at, it is hardly taken seriously. So avoid this.

Now get started with it.

Do not be too pushy

People hate salespersons that are too pushy and keep on nagging to sell. They are sure turn offs. Never consider your prospects as a disposal box of your product. If you find your prospect is not interested in your product, leave it there. If you become too pushy, you may end up losing the prospect forever and incur bad perception of your brand.

Don’t lose hope

With a failed trial or series of trials do not lose hope, it will show on your face and you may appear boring, sad and cold to a good prospect too. If you are not enthusiastic about your product or service, you can’t expect your prospect to find interest in it too. Staying motivated from street to door, under every circumstance, every atmosphere is important as it’s you who are ‘face’ of the brand. So appear enthusiastic, pleasant, motivated, and persuasive. Remember, your prospect is literally a ‘prospect’ for you, not your customer, so don’t expect him or her to be too receptive. They are the people who are not actively looking for your product and your visit is unexpected, interfering. Conversion rate in this type of sale is low, so accept the fact. In a failed attempt, just think it was a bad one and move on to the next with a winning attitude. Celebrate each successful sale, and stay motivated.

Little planning can be helpful

Rather than being random and ringing all doorbells on your way, with piled up rates of failure why don’t you start planning a bit and secure more chances of success? Good planning and research may help you. Know who is your target audience, where they are located, what promise they expect from you, what is their trust level, when are they available and receptive to your presentation, what motivates them etc. Choose locations accordingly. So before starting with your sales call do a thorough research on the demography and psychograph of the desired target group. Also, do not reach them in inappropriate time. Strike a balance between quantity and quality of calls.

And you are there. Go and shoot, win and celebrate.

It travels to important hands

Have you ever wondered when you go for an interview or go to meet your clients or your prospective groom why you dress up so carefully, keeping in mind you wear the best shirt? Because, first impression has huge impact and you want to put your best foot forward. Exactly the same thing is applicable for business card. Business card is like your identity, your face before the world. When you silently give it to someone it speaks a lot about you, sends across reflection of your taste, preference, personality, attitude. And I am sure you don’t want that person to get a wrong message about you or consider you an average daily encounter. To make a mark, you need to be different, appear appealing. Don’t forget it’s not just one person whom you reach. Recipient may give away your business card to someone else as well to contact you. So your identity travels along. If it’s appealing, you get talked about and admired.

Long stay

People generally lose business cards quite often. Have you ever thought why so? It’s because most of them look boring, so people do not show an effort to keep them with much care and simply throw inside drawers, envelopes, wallet etc. But if a business card looks appealing people make an extra effort towards not misplacing it and keep it in card holder with much care, while flashing it often before others. Such business cards are hardly lost and are recalled often, talked about and perceived in a favorable manner. If a business card looks good the person who receives it also checks it with much more appreciations and holds it for long, whereas an average business card is much ignored and people simply put them in pocket soon after getting the card.

So what are waiting for? Get rid of boring business card and find a good designer to flash an appealing business card everywhere you go.

High quality picture

What is very important for a video tutorial is its picture quality. Make sure picture resolution is high, with maximum clarity. Good finishing at the editing table is important too.

Subtitles, thought bubbles, supers

A video tutorial is never complete unless it has texts in forms of subtitles, texts in between scenes, thoughts bubbles, supers (text on screen) supporting the audio-visual input. People may think even a voice over (VO) can do the job, but it’s more effective and memorable when people read the same on screen. These supporting texts can do wonders.

Add some value to it

Don’t make just another video tutorial of no much substance in it. Make a video tutorial if you have enough knowledge of the subject, know it in-depth and have done enough research on the same before making the video tutorial. If you do not add something new to your video, no one will be interested in it.

Script has to be strong

No video tutorial comes out well, unless it has been developed on rock solid script. Don’t start a video tutorial without any script in front of you. It is the first step towards video making. Just special effects can’t do a magic to your video tutorial with no strong script in it.

Checklist at the end

Don’t forget a video tutorial remains incomplete unless it has a checklist at the end, summarizing the content communicated in the video. Checklist helps the audience to complie the entire content, to recall and memorize the main points and feel enriched.

Don’t make it dramatic

Always remember video tutorials are not films, or daily soaps. They don’t need acting skill or screen presence. Don’t develop a dramatic script, with twisted dialogues and pretentious moves. Keep it simple, straight on face, clear and substantial. At the same time, it shouldn’t be boring. Maintain the pace, neither fast nor too slow. Keep it conversational, interesting. Remember, it’s not entertainment, it’s information transmitted through interesting video with aids like live examples, demonstrations. Don’t forget its objective behind.

So what are you waiting for? Start with your video tutorial. Just follow these simple tips while making your video tutorial.

Make clothes appear detailed, and real

Most of the people who hesitate to buy from internet fear clothes given in the picture will be somewhat different from the original product in terms of color, texture, stitches, design. Make sure photographs of your clothing offerings are of superior quality, offer three dimensional view allowing super zooming; miniscule detail of the fabric’s texture, design, color, stitches, cuts etc. Allow people to zoom at maximum possible level and see the clothing from every angle – front, back, left side, right side.

Solve the size worry

Many times people fear about fitting of the clothing; i.e.; its size. Such worry is valid, since an ill fit garment is sheer disappointing. Make sure you give a size chart below your product, elaborating measurement of different body parts and respective size chart like XXS, XS, S, M, L, XL, and XXL etc. You may also use numerical. Follow the standard size chart, as people often blindly quote their size without seeing the size chart. To win people’s trust and trial, assure them with money back offer, if the garment bought does not fit well.

Don’t let the clothing hang from air

It looks very unrealistic and unappealing when sites display their clothing line, hanging from air. It doesn’t show off clothes’ textures, patterns, and cuts properly. Make sure, you display your clothes only worn by a real model or mannequin. Clothes do not display their proper texture, design, fit and cut unless cling to body.

Relevant recommendations

To hike up your sales when a viewer selects a product to see it in detail or orders for purchase, recommend few more relevant or similar choices below in thumbnails. Suppose the viewer is checking out backless blouses for women, you may recommend some open shoulder blouses too below. If a person is checking out stripe patters on shirts, you may recommend checks too. You never know, viewer may like it too and end up buying more than only the one he thought of initially.

Apart from these strategic/tactical issues which you need to handle when starting an online cloth store, you also need to think about the technical side of the business, like the quality of webhosting, bandwidth, disk space, domain name, database, website uptime, etc.

To draw an analogy from the real world, these things are akin to brick, mortar, gate, windows, and ceiling of your store. You need to have these things in place before you can execute any strategy. To put together technical aspects of running an online business at an affordable price, you can visit Gossimer.com, it offer’s affordable webhosting solutions.

Use an appealing voice over, original and different

In radio advertising, the utmost important thing is the voice quality. To grab attention make sure you break the stereotype voice patterns, choose a voice over artist who has very original and different tone of voice, clear and good pronunciation. Do not choose voices, which replicate some celebrity or others. Original nice voice always gets through the ears. If you are using regional dialect, make sure the voice over artist is master in the same language, as foreign languages are not always uttered with flawless perfection. Variation is pitch is important too.

Stir mystery

Don’t preach or inform. No one is interested in your lectures on the radio. Take a symbolic route. Do not reveal the product at first. Stir mystery, build story, hike interest. Then reveal the solution at the end. You may take a complete symbolic route. It will keep listener glued to the radio and pay attention. When the advertisement is direct, straight on face, listener tends to avoid them more.

Don’t stretch too long

Radio itself is a passive medium, people do not pay active attention towards it; they listen to it while doing some work or relaxing and reading. Thus do not bore them with long advertisement, keep your script short, interesting and captivating.

Use sound effects

Plain boring voice over hardly grabs attention. Dramatize your commercial with sound effects. They make the commercial appear realistic, amusing, and complete. It makes your commercial expressive.

Repeat the brand name, but don’t exaggerate

Radio is audio medium, challenged by less attention and lack of visual aid; thus sending the brand name across is very difficult task. People often remember the advertisement however, fail to recognize the brand. As a result, you may repeat your brand name twice, but not more than that. Too repeated effort appears silly and boring.

Telephone interruptions

We hardly consider how much time we waste on telephonic conversations each day. Many of us are quite glued to our phones and don’t even realize how we waste a potent portion of the day conversing on phone. While working keep your phone either in silent mode or switch it off. It’s a big interruption while working.

Extended lunch breaks

While working at office, lunch is definitely not just a matter of eating, but also unwinding oneself. At the same time, extended lunch break filled with gossiping can actually prove to be a serious hazard. Keep lunch break relaxing, but not too addictive that you wish to carry it on and on for hours.

Frequent coffee or smoke breaks

At work place people are often seeing taking too frequent tea, coffee and smoke breaks. These are highly addictive and time wasters. You may think it’s a great way of unwinding yourself, but when done too frequently it’s more like a bad habit. You may end up socializing during these breaks and wasting lot of time.

Small naps are never small

People are often seeing taking small naps in-between work. But in reality they are hardly small ones get extended and definitely waste lot of time. They are addictive too, you may soon start regular naps. Rather than taking naps in between work, try to finish work first and then sleep with a relaxed mind.

Socializing on the job

People often socialize too much at work place, indulge into gossiping and waste big amount of time in a day.

Television watching

Television is one addictive medium, which results into severe time wastage. If you wish to watch something particularly on television, make sure you watch it only and don’t keep the television on for extended long hours. It results into huge time killing.

Social networking websites

These days a major chunk of the professionals, students, even home makers devote a large portion of their daily schedule in social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, Hi5, MySpace and the like. They are highly addictive and cause serious damage to work schedule.

Poor planning
Ill planning of daily schedule or inability to set priority of work can land one into grave problem. Start planning your daily work, set a priority ladder of most important work towards least important ones. Work on the same, accordingly.

Multi tasking

Don’t try to juggle between too many works. Work on a specific job at a time. Too many works at a time can distract you from your goal and shared attention results into average quality work.

One vision, many hands

Biggest benefit of teamwork is that there is just one fixed goal and multiple minds to work on the same. It eases the process, lightens workload on each mind, and helps multiple ideas to crop up since multiple minds are involved. Since all have same goal in front, there is less chance of deviation from the end goal and multiple reasons of better ideas to come on the surface. Since every mind thinks differently, there is always chance of bringing multiple new thoughts and ideas on the table.

Time saving

Major benefit of working in a team is time saving and finishing work within the stipulated time, meeting deadline with an ease. Great work makes no sense to client if it’s not finished within the time and remains incomplete. Since a team shares responsibility and divides work as per the skills required. This way deadline is easily met.

Better adaptability and flexibility

Since people work in a team, there is less of self defensive attitude found among the team workers. People adapt better to the given situation, are found less obsessed with own work, are more receptive and adaptable to new ideas, suggestions and situations which is not seen when people work alone. People learn more in a group as one may commit a mistake which is checked by fellow group members. If one doesn’t know certain things can also learn from co-workers. People working in team are more flexible, ready to changes and new innovations.

Loud make up

Females are frequently tempted to put on heavy mask of makeup, coats of loud make up base, dark eye makeup and lip color. Trust me, world is not a dance floor all the time. You should not wear any loud or dark or too much of make up to the interview, instead of enhancing your personality it may make you appear bad. Keep it bare minimum, soft and subtle. Don’t wear dark colors, unconventional shining make up, or the color which doesn’t suit you.

Unkempt hair

Women are generally seen more careful about their hair, but men are not. They often reach the interview with messy hair. While your recruiter is talking to you and looking straight into your eyes, your hair is not missed either. Keep your hair tidy, nicely combed or brushed and preferably tied if long. Men should keep it short. Women should tie it up neatly or keep open while making sure hair doesn’t fall on face or cover it partially.

Glossy jewelries

Not only women, but men are also often seen flaunting heavy shiny metallic bracelets, ear rings, finger rings, neck pieces. They are absolute distracters. Women can wear light and simplistic ear rings or neck pieces to the interview. But keep it bare minimum. Avoid shiny jewelries, they are highly distracting. Don’t let your jewelries draw attention of recruiter more than yourself.

Informal clothes

Interview demands formal attire, neat shirt, trouser, and neck tie or business suit. Girls may opt for formal trouser or skirt, with neat shirt. Don’t forget to combine your dress with neat pair of socks and shoes.

You need to appear sober in your interview, and instead of attracting attention to your looks, you will like your interviewer to see your talent, as this is what will get you a job.

But how to spread this awareness about sports, reach people and draw them towards your sports club? Here are few tips for your help.

Build their interest

It’s mostly kids, teenagers who are all the more attracted towards sports activities. They love chasing balls, diving deep into water, striking goal, hitting right on the bull’s eye. It helps in growth of a child, strengthens muscles, improves confidence and mental power, builds personality, and increases physical stamina and the like. You may sponsor a school’s sports facilities. You may offer volley ball, tennis, and cricket. Try to get into a partnership with the school; it will be happier to outsource the sports activity to your club, as you will look after its maintenance and everything. Instead you can share the total profit with the school as per mutual agreement, take the entire responsibility of sports, and get the benefit of advertising your sports club, so that sports interested kids can go to your club apart from training at school. This way you will get an opportunity to build interest of kids towards sports and you may attract them with additional and attractive sports reserved for the club members only.

Get into corporate offices

To attract the main working force, professionals who are suffering from severe stress and sedentary lifestyle and unhealthy habit, it’s smart way to reach them through their offices. Join hands of corporate leaders. Introduce sports within the office premises. Ask the corporate to indulge and motivate their employees to divert their stress into relaxing sports. Specially knowing the needs of employees offer some stress bursting sports. You may slowly evolve as a corporate sports club, or if you wish to maintain own entity of your sports club, you can continue to publicize the same through corporate.

Keep your consultancy fee low

In the beginning do not ask for premium price. Keep it low and competitive. Since you are catching up with the market and wish to change the way people look up to interior decoration service, keep your consultancy charge as low as possible.

Offer free advices for a day

Initially to attract people with the exuberance of your skill, you can give some free advices as a free sample. You may run offers all across magazines, newspapers, television saying your interior decoration experts will be visiting individual houses to provide free advice and guidance regarding their houses. You may offer free service only for a specific room within the house. This way you will soon gain popularity and become a household name for all. For further help people will remember of you and recommend your name to others.

Start networking on Facebook

A recent social networking rage – Facebook is a phenomenal way to get popular overnight. Build a fan page of your company. Your only mission is to have as many fans as possible and maximum numbers of ‘like’s and ‘comment’s against your posts. Now start getting active here. Frequently update status. You can post some questions, advices, achievements, contests, tips, pictures of beautiful decors done by your company and videos, pictures of fans, testimonials etc. Start running weekly contests, asking people to share or comment or reply to questions where you may give free goodies to winners. It will keep the attention of your fans really high and your company will reap fast growth of followers.

Always show ‘before’ and ‘after’ state

Whenever you wish to convince your audience with the caliber of your company, always display your work. People will realize worth of your work only when you compare the result with what it was before. So display the ‘before’ and ‘after’ picture side by side. It will convince the audience about your skills.

To bust this promotion myth, in this article, I am going to talk about three places where one can promote one’s web hosting reseller accounts.

Web hosting forums

Meaningful discussions in web hosting forums pull a significant numbers of visitors, some of which, after seeing your offers converts into customers.

You need to participate in 4-5 top forums, and visit each one of them regularly so that you can build credibility in the market. And always remember to not ever do blatant promotion. It often gets neglected and it may result in banning.

Add your plans to web hosting directories

Regardless of what they say, vertical directories (niche specific directories) works wonder – sometimes directly, while at others indirectly by boosting your search ranking.

Choose a handful of high-PR web hosting directories and submit your website into each one of them. Provide as much details as possible. Make sure you have filled each column properly.

Start web hosting channel on YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine on the web, and in many ways it has replaced article consumption. Now more and more people watch instructional as well as educational videos, and you do not need to be a Hollywood film producer or director to produce or create such video. For that, all you need is a basic consumer camera, PowerPoint, screen recorder, and a headphone.

You will not even need PowerPoint and screen capture software, if all you need to do is talking. Create a YouTube channel, deliver good content, and optimizing it for discoverability.

Start will these three things now, and see the result. In the next article, I will give you some more tips on promoting your web hosting reseller accounts.

Do not focus on search engines

This is the major mistake most of the inexperienced writers do when exposed to SEO – they start writing for search engine bots to please them. This is a mistake because even if – the chances of which is very slim – search engine bots liked your content and ranked it high in its SERP, but it still it will not convert well because it is not written for human users, which will force major search engines to drop it from top ranking. Writing for search engines never works. Always write for humans.

Do not repeat same keyword over and over again

Repeating one complex word – yes keywords are a little complicated – many times in a short span of 4-5 sentences will make readers quiver with anger. No one will again want to come back to your page to read the content. Using keywords in an article is fine, but using it too many times just pushes everyone away – search bots as well as users.

Use synonyms, plural and replacement words of a keyword

Search engines do not rank a page only because it is highly optimized for a keyword, but also because of the context in which it was used. I would suggest you to find words related to your keywords and use it in your body. You can also use synonyms and plural of the keywords. It will help boost your ranking.

If you are new to this field, do not try to jump ladders, learning new skills take time and effort, and more time and effort you will give, the more thorough your understanding will be of the field. Do not rush. Take it easy and learn as much about web writing as you can. You can even start a blog and write daily to sharpen your writing skills.

Here are few effective marketing tips.

Know your niche

Many good photographers are often seen claiming to be good in every area of photography, which is actually quite impossible these days. So find your niche area. Find in which type of photography you are actually stunning. It could be any – wild life photography, fashion photography, product photography. Make sure you excel in one area and build a fabulous portfolio of the same. Soon you will be known for your niche specialization. Write your area of specialization like your business card, letter heads.

Get listed

It’s very important for people to find you. Get visible. Get seen on photography related directories, photography journals, search engine, magazines so that your target audience can easily reach you. Not only your target market, it will also help you to be recognized in the photography industry.

Photography websites

Put your best photographs in all photography archive websites. You may still reserve rights with you by maintaining copyrights. Your photographs in such sites will draw many people close to you, who will follow you and turn your fan.

Facebook page

These days a major a tool of online marketing is through Facebook. Own a Facebook page where you can build your fan list. Put your best photographs, it is more like virtual exhibition of your talent before the world. Update your Facebook status often, ask for people’s feedback, and also follow great photographers you admire. Eventually they will also get to know you and may love your work too. You may also join photographers’ communities.

Professional tips

You may soon evolve as the best expert of photography. Start your own web page or forum or blog, where you promote yourself as the solution provider to newbie or aspirants. You can help people with expert advices and suggestions.

The research found that, the year on year (YoY) growth of e-mail consumption(unique visitors) in Canada is negative between December 2009 and December 2010. In December 2009, 12 million Canadians used one or another form of e-mail sites, whereas, only 10 million did so in the same month in 2010, which is a 28% decline (see image below to see the e-mail site usage trajectory).

The research has suggested that not only unique e-mail viewership has gone down, but the e-mail engagement has significantly fallen down. The total visits to email websites from Canada has fallen in the fourth quarter of 2010(500 million) from its position in the same quarter in 2009 (650 million). The total visit fell by 18%

The time spent on e-mail sites has also seen a decline. From 5.9 million in the studied period in 2009, it has fallen to 5.2 million in the same period in 2010, which is 11% decline in e-mail minutes. (See the image below for details).

It is hard to draw any conclusion from the above data, unless overall activity of Canadian net users is studied. It might be possible that people have reduced the use of e-mail sites and substituted it with social sites (read Facebook). I must add here that Facebook has also unveiled its own email program ([email protected]). Could it be responsible for the shift?

Not very unlikely! What is your view on this?

Too much of text

We are often tempted to overstuff our PowerPoint slides with too much of text and long paragraphs. Don’t forget presentation is all about putting points on slides and narrating or elaborating them in detail verbally. Don’t suffocate your presentation with too much of text. No one is interested in reading long texts. So write in bullets or points. Elaborate those verbally. Make sure you leave blank space in your slides.

Too much of animation

Many presenters love to show off their technical skills by animating each line or graphic of the slides. Remember, simplicity always sells. Don’t let the whoosh sound of your presentation distract the audience. It’s highly annoying when repeated. Keep slides simple, minimalistic, and elegant. Don’t animate each and every text or header or graphic element in it. Too much of rotation, blinking, floating, swinging of elements worsen a good content. Don’t use those animated sounds which are highly disturbing.

Baseless data

Presenters often put factual data, without mentioning the source. It’s a strict ‘no no’. Never put facts and figures, graphs without mentioning its source. No data seems authentic and valid without the source mentioned. People may doubt credibility of your presentation.

Reading out from the slides

Often presenters are seen doing nothing, but simply reading out whatever is there on the PowerPoint slide. It not only bores the audience, but also doesn’t add any value to the entire presentation session. You can add substantial value to a presentation only when you give your valuable inputs besides reading out from the slides alone. It also shows presenter’s lack of confidence, public speaking fear and lack of knowledge.

Make sure you avoid these mistakes.

Master the art of writing for web

Writing for web is remarkably different than writing for print, as the attention span of people on the web is pretty short. You need to write using bullet points, headings, subheadings, images, etc.

Master the art of writing headline

A headline is very important in increasing the open rate of your content. You may get the best ranking for all the keywords, but if you do not have an attractive headline, your article will not get read. You should know how to write killer headlines.

Learn a bit about keywords and SEO

A little knowledge of SEO and keywords is required for all online writers, as keywords are the basis on which the entire web is organized. You should educate yourself on these two.

Prepare a portfolio

Writing is an art, and you are an artist. And an artist who does not have anything to show cannot support his claim of producing a fantastic piece of art. You should, therefore, prepare a portfolio keeping everything that I talked above. This will be your asset that you will need to show your clients.

Write a cover letter

A cover letter is like a direct sales letter. It either persuades your prospective clients to see your portfolio, or it can bore them to death. Many a freelancing assignments are made or broken at this level only. So spend good deal of time in creating a killer cover letter that can literally pull your clients with hands and make them read your sample articles.

You should follow the above given suggestions to start a freelance career. You can add some more items to your preparation, but you should not remove any. Each one of them is important. Very important!