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.

Here are some popular ways of celebrity promotion on Internet.

Own a Facebook page

There’s no other social networking site as powerful, as popular as Facebook. To reach out to the fans and keep them updated with the latest work a celebrity can own a page. It’s a great way to increase the fan and follower base. Just by putting a ‘like’ button the celebrity can achieve millions of followers. A celebrity can post his or her latest pictures, events to attend, achievements, recent offerings and work and all on his page, for the followers to cherish a piece of the celebrity’s life. A celebrity can also treat his fans and followers with regular status updates, reply to comments and frequent updates. It’s a great way to keep up the popularity high. One can do every bit of Facebooking from a mobile phone.

Twitter is magical

Twitter is one more platform to build up a huge base of followers. Twitter also offers high credibility by authenticating a celebrity with verified member status. Twitter is a great tool to let the world know what the celebrity is doing every moment, where he or she is heading to, what he is eating, whom he is meeting, what’s his plan for the day, whom is he dating and partying with. Such updates keep fans hooked onto Twitter, staying in touch with every bit of the celebrity. Twitter also allows celebrities to post personal pictures and upload posts immediately, even from mobile phone.

Blogging

Personal blog is one more personalized way of a celebrity to reach out to its fans and followers. Regular blog posts are a must to keep up the interest of its visitors. It’s like reflection of a celebrity where he or she can freely express his thoughts, ideas, goals, dreams – anything under the sun. Blogs are highly interactive as readers not only read actively, but also drop comments and come back regularly.

First tweet then follow

What most people do after joining twitter is they start following as many people as they can and as soon as they can. This is a very bad strategy to increase your twitter follower count. A good one is to start with posting informative and entertaining tweets followed by following people in the fields of your interest. This way you will get more active followers who will give you more opportunity.

No spamming please

Do not start tweeting in bulk as people with “spammer” tag does. Act with moderation and tweet only what is really, really important. If you want people to hire you for a job then do not post stuffs that will take away from your image.

Talking of quality content, I will recommend you to record a video of you talking about what you do, what is your qualification, and how much work experience you have, etc., and tweet this video cover letter once or twice a day.

Do not act desperate

This will not do any good. Tweeting too much may force people to ignore you, if not unfollow you. There is no need to post your résumé five times a day. Tweet your résumé or video cover letter maximum twice a day. That is enough.

You should not deviate from this tweeting practice for even a single day. Have patience, result will come.

Building an audience isn’t so much about what you write yourself, but how you communicate.  Your Twitter account, if you’re using it to sell an idea, business, or product, needs to become a community forum.  Your tweets are only useful if you can guarantee people are reading them.  The way to do that is to build followers, and the best way to build followers is getting them involved.

Make use of Twitter’s search function.  See what people are saying involving your concepts or business, and reply to them through your page.  Ask questions, or comment on tweets that they’ve made regarding you.  Start a running dialog, so that they’ll gain more interest and also mention you on their page, which will also build interest with a new audience.

Consider how useful the ability to re-tweet really is.  By re-tweeting you draw attention to a comment someone else made, and put your own spin on the material.  This will be noticed by the original tweeter, and your audience.  Both can work to build the traffic on your page, and the more meaningful views you’ll garner.

Finally, everyone likes pictures, especially search engines.  The more pictures you use, the more people will be drawn to your page.  I’m not talking about pictures of anything.  But try to upload meaningful and visually insightful pictures that relate to your Twitter page as often as possible.  These will get more comments, and more chances for re-tweets.  Both of which are necessary to build your page.

So obviously the first step is to create a professional Twitter page.  Whether for your business, or personal business ventures, make sure that you update often.  The quickest way to be forgotten is to tweet only once every few days.  You have to keep your Twitter page active, usually with multiple tweets per day, so that there is always more content for an interested party to keep tabs on.

Use Twitter search to narrow down people, or other businesses that might be interested in finding your Twitter page.  Try and contact them, either through mention on your Twitter account or via personal message to let them know about you.  This way you can gain more and more followers.  Your efforts won’t be very successful if you don’t have very many followers accessing your tweets.

Remember to take care of your followers as you gain them as well.  Respond to them, mention them, etc.  Make them involved, as they will become interested, and also mention you in their tweets, and that’s free advertising.  Keeping your followers interested is key to building the Twitter page, and increasing your effectiveness.

Finally use Twitter’s search function to see how many mentions you are getting on other pages throughout the site.  This is a good way to keep up on how successful your efforts have been.  Also you’ll be able to keep track of what you should change to accommodate the greater interest.  Twitter feedback is valuable, so take full advantage of the ability to see accurate feedback so quickly.

Think of what you would expect from a leader, and what you hope to gain out of becoming one.  If it helps make a list of each, preferably side by side, to figure out your motivation.  These factors will give you a guide to follow.  By writing out what you want, and what you expect, you have a good idea of whether or not being a leader works for you.  In most cases being a leader means taking a back seat for the better good of the team sometimes.  If you aren’t prepared to do that, you’ll have a hard time developing your leadership skills.

To be a leader you have to be prepared to take charge.  Being a leader is just what the title implies, you are expected to lead your followers, or your team.  The best way to do that is to lead by example.  You have to be the best performer, so that the rest of the team can feed off your leadership.  Nobody wants to follow a coworker that can’t achieve goals as well as they can.  This doesn’t mean you have to be the best at doing the job, but rather the best at meeting goals and following directions.  This way you inspire through example, making yourself a natural leader before you ever have the title.

Finally, you have to be the anchor of the team.  When the cards look like they’re stacked against everyone, you have to be the person to bring the motivation to get the job done.  A leader motivates the team by any means available.  So if you want to be a leader, you have to be able to stay positive to help your team get the job done, no matter the situation.

There is a third major challenger in this OS War, and this challenger is not one entity rather it’s a family, Linux Family. The problem of Linux is Linux itself. It is an open source operating system that effectively means anyone can take Linux Kernels, make the tweaking and build a customized version of it. Sounds fascinating, isn’t it? It is this fascination that is going against Linux. There is no one Linux, rather there is a huge army of various Linux Operating Systems around. The last estimation suggests the presence of close to 100 Linux Distributions in the market. (Read List of Linux distributions and Comparison of Linux distributions on Wikipedia to get the complete list of Linux distributions).

These different distributions are different operating systems in their own rights, so despite having the most robust architecture Linux has failed to catch the fancy of average home user. People are not sure which one to go for and which Linux is the Linux he or she wants. There are number of things that are stopping the growth of Linux Operating system, and they are:

1. User’s perception of Linux being hard to use: This is a common deterrent. The average user who hardly knows to make his or her way around windows finds Linux to be made for aliens or geeks.

2. Fear of being beginner: More than 90 percent of the world population has grown with Windows and Microsoft Office packages around, so word processor (Word), spreadsheet maker (Excel), or presentation maker (PowerPoint) got the power of default. The user cannot even think of working on any other office packages. They fear they will have to relearn everything from scratch. This fear immobilizes them. Users of other software packages like, Photoshop, Acrobat also have the similar feelings.

3. Linux doesn’t come bundled in: Unlike Windows Linux seldom comes bundled in with a new PC. This works against Linux.

Linux has the most secure, failsafe and robust architecture, and Mac, indeed, is the coolest looking personal computers around, but it is the Windows that got the largest share of pie, perhaps because windows got the power of default working in its favour, or may be because the range of applications available for the platform? The relationship between application and operating system is an interesting one. It tells the same old chicken and egg story. Which one should come first?