How To Make Money While You Sleep With Online Marketing

by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 21, 2017 | Business, Marketing | 0 comments

“Business is all about relationships…..how well you build them determines how well they build your business…..” – Brad Sugars

Small business owners are the most struggling people who’re trying to establish their product and striving hard to make their brand stand firm in the market. And as per the quote above, all businesses are about relationships with customers and Marketing is the tool adopted for it.

Small business people break their heads into promoting their brand by adopting all marketing strategies like giving ads in traditional media like newspapers and the Yellow pages. But still not able to see expected results from traditional marketing techniques and looking out for some other options.

All this happens in a normal round cycle of marketing: You meet and attract your clients, convert them into customers, get money, grow repeat business with them and motivate your present customers to refer other prospective clients. Though it may sound easy, in reality, each of these steps has its own challenges that business owners encounter and the best solution for speeding up things is – Automation.

Automating or implementing systems or strategies that works out for your business without your constant involvement is the key to generate income for you while sleeping. Online marketing makes this easy and there are numerous benefits of internet marketing over traditional marketing which are as follows.

• Online marketing through the internet and social media sites helps to rightly focus on your target demographic than with direct marketing.
• Proper implementation of marketing efforts through your websites gives good visibility in search engines, and hence long – term returns on investment.
• Holding customers’ attention and making them engage with you is not possible with an ad in a newspaper, but it’s pretty possible with a social media post and a good website.
• Online advertising and marketing costs you very less when compared to giving

Ads in traditional media outlets like yellow pages.

Just imagine you’re sound asleep while your bank account is getting filled up with money from your business? Sounds nice right?

You may question, “Man how’s that possible”

Yes, brother, it’s possible with the internet. Online marketing will help you generate a passive income from your business while you’re sleeping, and here’s how it is.

1.Sell Your Products Online

A successful businessman constantly studies about his customers’ trends and desires and sets up his business accordingly. How many of the customers today come shopping in a street shop when there are so many e-commerce websites available for their convenience? Why do you have to invest hundreds and thousands of dollars into production expenses, rent, employee salaries, and other costs? Added to this is your constant presence in the shop investing your time?

Open an online store! You can easily set up your virtual shop front with the help of e-commerce software such as Big Cartel, Shopify or eBay or your own website and this is what happens. Go to sleep and somewhere someone will be shopping your products online. They pay you money and you deliver the products the next day. Sounds pretty easy!

2.Implement Network Marketing For Your Business

Network marketing, or commonly known as Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) helps small business owners to easily make money while sleeping if they implement it with the right people. It’s like a chain of networks choosing people from your same product line to be distributors or salespeople of your product with some sales compensation.  It’s almost like word of mouth marketing or referral marketing.

Wouldn’t it be an added advantage for your business when someone apart from you is also trying to sell your product to customers?

Double the marketing and double the profits in return!

But the only alertness you gotta have before implementing network marketing for your business is clear research. You should clearly research and make sure that it is of your kind of product line and trusting your product with them would be surely profitable. Otherwise, it’d be a waste of your precious time signing up with them for your product.

3.Setup an Official Blog

Creating an affiliate blog or in other words, doing Affiliate marketing will help you make more money while you’re sleeping or resting.

What’s Affiliate marketing? To put it in a simple way, it’s a kind of performance–based marketing where the business owner gives rewards to one or more affiliates who bring in revenue to their company through their own marketing efforts. This affiliate marketing goes hand in hand with internet marketing through many options like SEO, e-mail marketing and content marketing.

What you have to do is, set up an official website or affiliate blog with a strong number of followers on a relevant topic that targets your business. There are even websites that help you do this like ClickJunction, ClickBank and so on. With relevant keywords that would help promote your blog, write articles and other affiliate offers. SEO will optimize your blog, and promote it all around the web. When you notice that there’s increasing traffic to your blog, establish some ads for affiliate offers.

People click these ads and money starts flowing online!

4.Build Upon a Membership Community

People or customers are always looking out for valuable information and when you provide that, there are a lot of chances of you getting repeated income through it.

How?

First, establish yourself as a worthy source of information about products or the services that people are searching for. This can be exposed via your website or blog. When constantly people go through your articles and information–driven content, they’ll get to know that you have got some really good stuff within you from which they can derive benefits.

Now you can create a membership community when more people have started following you responding to your posts. You can provide preliminary information in the front end and can charge a membership fee for them to access more or gain more information. A good idea indeed, isn’t it?

What you get here is recurring passive income in exchange for the researching and time spent in the internet searching and giving info to people.  So, your members will be paying you money while you sleep over your couch.

5.Discover Sponsors For Your Articles Or Regular Blog Columns

Your website has a number of visitors or may be any particular topics or columns in your blog may have more followers and popularity. Why don’t you make use of it?

Ads are the best options to bring money to your account while you’re resting still. You can make a lucrative amount of money through these columns of your website by giving space to sponsors. Just by mentioning their product or logo into popular columns of your blog, money gushes into your bank account.

Discover sponsors for whom you can offer sponsorship for your most invited articles among internet viewers. You can make the column itself to be branded or else set aside some space for the ad inside the article. When you mention that the particular article or column is sponsored by XYZ Company, it yields you a dual benefit.

One, it makes your visitors feel good about your credibility and two, it catches the eye of more advertisers about your professionalism and makes them think that you’re offering a good offer for them too.

6.Do Online Advertising

This is almost similar to the one that we discussed above, that is, affiliate blog. But for online advertising to work out very well, your website should be driving more traffic to churn out more money.

Your website should be a self-supporting and self – sustaining one for it to generate money while you’re still asleep. With an enormous amount of traffic, your advertising revenue becomes your passive income.

Maybe initially you may be getting much low as some 10 or 20 bucks, but as you produce more quality content which is new each and every day, gradually your traffic may increase. And automatically your earnings too will go high to as much as making even $100 a day. Dude that’ll be a great profit for you!

7.Put Up An Auto-Responder List For Your E-Mail Subscribers

This is one of the best methods of generating cash with online marketing.

You know what will attract your potential clients or target audience. Neatly frame up a free product or information that they may want to download once they give their e-mail. Ask them to click a link that drives traffic to a ‘landing page’ that asks for the visitors’ e-mail id. There are lots of tools nowadays to set up sign up boxes like this when people visit your website page. You can build a good number of subscribers who may gradually turn out into your customers.

Put up an auto-responder with links to download your product and send it to your e-mail subscribers, following it with a series of (automatically sent) mails. You can try out AWeber for this.  Let days pass….weeks….and months pass and finally there’ll be someday when you can get these same subscribers as your customers for special product offers or prices.

Just a reminder: Always add something of value in the emails you send them such as grabbing a special discount or offer.

8.Make Money Through Selling Your Own Product Guides

Hey here’s another tactical approach of making hot cash online with your own product while sleeping. Rather than approaching other intermediates for selling your products, you can set up everything and put up on your web page.

You can include selling extra products like DVDs or e-books or software or any other manuals or guides or informational products related to your business. It’s like you providing a complete store of what your customers wanted. They need not go elsewhere to gain more information.

Another benefit of this: Again you can add up more subscribers to your auto-responder list.

Instead of selling these products on a third-party site getting only half of the commission amount, you can get higher profit and flexibility too. That’s like getting both butter and jam for a loaf of bread!

Implement these marketing strategies; Sleep; Relax; The internet will render money for you!

How to Get Clients

by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 21, 2017 | Business, Marketing | 0 comments

In the business of web design, to not worry where the next client comes from, is a lie. It’s not a concern only if you build a very good portfolio, gather enough experience over time and possess certain level of notoriety in your industry. To get a healthy and consistent flow of clients is a great struggle unto itself. Comparatively it’s far easier to challenge a Bear to a fight.

If this task sounds daunting to you already then perhaps you should turn around form this stressful business right away and start rethinking about your life plan.

I hope the naysayers are long gone after laying eyes on the previous statement. Getting down to the topic at hand. To get clients is not an easy task. In the absence of clients you don’t have any job to do; let alone make any money.

If you want them, do not lose grip of your emotions! Clients look for confidence in the person whom they are about to hire. You can very well lose your client by losing emotional control or by freaking out. This doesn’t mean that you should be hard to get. You should be calm and composed and display a persona that encourages the client to put their livelihood and reputation on the line by hiring you.

You are all set to gain valuable information about how to handle your clientele. You could be a freelancer or a small business owner. All these concepts will be of great value if understood appropriately. Even if you are a person who doesn’t fall in the aforementioned categories but still has to deal with clients these will be applicable to you too.

Clients are everything in the website design business. They are as important to you as it is blood to the human body. Without them there is no life, no business, no money and you would be forced to shut your doors.

Referrals Are Gold In Business

In the beginning, all the jobs come in the form of referrals. In most cases, there is no formal R.F.P (Request for Proposal) processes. Usually, when we are looking for a new doctor or lawyer you end up asking people who you trust, for names and contacts of such people. It’s a lot faster than doing research and coming up with names yourself and it’s better because instead of relying on some stranger who posted in some blog online; you get the information you need from a person you trust. Not only that, you get to know the background story which usually strengthens your resolve. If they don’t like the service they had, they wouldn’t recommend those people to you.

The base factor is always trust.

For the sake of argument let’s assume that you developed back pain after an intense weekend of football. First, you will go through memory trying to remember your friend or your relative who had similar pain.

Then you reach out to that person and gather information about that pain and the successive treatment process. Had the person been successfully treated; you would want the contact information of the doctor who treated the friend of yours. If their experience is positive and encouraging, you end up visiting the doctor. This is how referrals work.

The process of hiring people for doing design jobs has the same operating procedure. Many people don’t work with design people often. Usually, the contact book of such people has more listings of doctors other than the listings of design people or design studio teams.

This is why, in such cases, they rely on people who they knew about, who had prior dealings with design people. It’s because they trust the people they know more than the listings on Yelp by a stranger or some unknown person replying to their R.F.P.

Let’s say that you are a client who needs to get a job done and you are caught up choosing between two design teams. Always, you would end up choosing the design team with the referral or (in some case where there is a presence of multiple referrals) you choose the referral given by the source you trust the most.

And F.Y.I the vetting process is both ways. A well established and socially popular client is more likely to pay up that an unpopular or unheard of the client.

How To – To Get Referrals

Most referrals come from friends or colleagues or form colleagues’ friends. In all cases, your reputation counts.

“You Reputation is divided into two balancing factors. Your ability to be pleasant to work with and the quality of your work.”

Know everyone forms your client’s team and treat them very well. Make them an integral part of the project and make sure that you hear their voices. In other words, make them feel welcome and important part of the process.

People you work with form the client’s team propagate to other jobs over time. If your project in which they were involved goes well, they will be proponents of your reputation to whichever company they go to. When they are in a position to choose a design team, they will choose you.

Just because you are trustable as you are familiar.

Everything you deliver and every interaction you have with your client is part of your business development process. Every successful job leads to more jobs over time. So, maintain a good reputation.

Be Pleasant, Not Nice

You have to be pleasant to work with because people tend to like working with someone who is pleasant than with someone who is a jerk. At the same time, you shouldn’t fake anything. Good work requires the need for a few hard conversations when the need arises.

Also, you shouldn’t maintain a facade of harmony, unnecessarily. Your job entails you to point out to your client when a poor decision is about to be made by them. If you are being nice you will be too afraid to point it out to them because you simply wouldn’t want to risk being a jerk in the eyes of your client.

As a result, you would end up jeopardising your project just to preserve your harmonic work environment. Be pleasant, nothing more!

Do Good, If Not Great Work

Being pleasant to work with will help but it won’t act as a ‘beacon of great work’ for clients to find you. This doesn’t mean that just the quality of your work is more than enough to have a gathering of potential clients; waiting for their turn to work with you.

Good, if not great work must be the foundation and core mantra of your business. Always remember this. You are replaceable! There is no shortage of talent in this world. There are many design teams out there who have just an impressive portfolio yours.

Your clients are not just hiring your portfolio. Instead, they are hiring you. If you are aiming to improve your metrics of success, you have to be both good at work and pleasant to work with. The actual work you do isn’t the design tasks you execute.

But it is the summation of all the decisions that were made through all the conversations you had with your client during the whole duration of the project. It’s this experience that makes them either love you or hate you. The latter is what you should strive to achieve.

Be Enthusiastic And Unambiguous About Your Work

This is what we call as the ‘Pitch’minus the proverbial elevator. You do it while having a hangout with other people whilst having drinks or other pleasantries. You have to explain yourself in an enthusiastic manner which is not boring to the listeners.

In culinary terms, it’s referred to as having ‘Just the Right Amount of Salt.’

An enthusiastic and interesting person gets etched in the mental picture of the listeners very deeply and hard to remove. But being boring will result in the mental picture hitting the mental dustbin soon.

If you play your cards right and when those people who you were passionately explaining yourself to will remember you when they require a person of your expertise or when they get a chance to recommend you to someone else. This happens all the time. So, be clear and enthusiastic and not boring.

Networking Is a Must

To succeed in any business, networking is a must. It is nothing but research and manners dancing in sync. You never know who is about to hire you until the last possible moment. It definitely makes things easier for you to know a lot of folks. You accomplish this through networking.

If you don’t know how the networking playbook works, follow this. Every time you meet somebody gets to know some things about them. What they like, enjoy, their favourite topics of choice is? Think of something you could do to help them. When the conversation is strong and mutually pleasant, you tell about what you do and what you need.

Just don’t make ‘recommending yourself’ the central point of the conversation.

You have to be genuine and express confidence. This takes a lot of practice. Don’t sweat when you decide to ask someone to recommend. People are usually excited to know people to refer about. If you are trustworthy and solid, people just love doing it.

You Have To Make Yourself  Visible

If you don’t say what you think of, no one will know about it. If you are a shy person, you just have to go through it. Push through the feeling that holds you back from reaching out. Unless you make yourself visible, people won’t know you exist.

No clients, no pitches, no money. So make yourself visible to others so that they can approach you and find you worthy and write you check leaves. Publish about yourself, your business and your designs.

Don’t be afraid to try. The more you do it, the more experienced you get and your confidence will grow stronger and stronger with each passing hour. So do your exposure and your clientele. Publish about you, your design work, get conversations going about you (preferably your studio) and your designs over social media. Used in the right way they will help you grow exponentially. Visibility is the key.

Sustain Relationships

Your relationship with your client doesn’t have to end when the project comes to an end. You still have the responsibility to check about the success of your work and the whole enterprise altogether. Find out whether your services met every expectation.

In order to maintain a healthy flow of referrals, you have to maintain relationships. It’s not a hard process. It’s a busy life. Everyone is dealing with their own share of work and other activities. You can send some emails from time to time, without spamming their inbox of course and call them up and just say hello.

Drop by when you are in their vicinity. Congratulate them when they have accomplished something. Doing it publicly is an added bonus. Shows that you care about them. Something which they will reciprocate when the time comes.

Once in a while, you can arrange a meetup and spend some time and drop a hint or two that you are still looking out referrals. But don’t make it the central theme of the whole meet up.

Fulfill Your Responsibility Towards Your Referrer

You have a responsibility towards people who refer you to others. They put their reputation on the line when they are recommending you to someone. So treat the opportunity with the utmost care and do an outstanding job. Such a job well done by you will not only protect your referrer’s reputation but also your referrer network gets big by one more satisfied and extremely happy client.

Poor work on your part will lead to a loss of trust in you for your referrer. Your client at that time won’t refer you to anyone. In addition, you will also have strained the relationship between your referrer and your client.

If you are booming in your business you will be flooded with business inquiries. But, of all the jobs that come your way, your studio won’t be right for all of them. In such cases, you should determine this as soon as possible. Every time you spend not doing work on your client’s project is time spent losing money. Which otherwise, you could be potentially making.

To avoid this from happening, I suggest you develop a questionnaire to determine if the lead at hand is a potential client or not. If the lead clears the questionnaire then you can be certain that the person is worth spending your precious time on.

As much as you are evaluating your client, you are being evaluated by them too. It’s surprising but true. So, when you figure out that you are not the right studio or not the right fit, tell them. Trust me, you’ll know. In cases where you deal with clients who were referred to you by your past clients, you are obliged to have a face to face with them.

During this, you can decide whether you are the right fit for them and if possible you could direct them to the studios that are appropriate for them. This behaviour of yours develops goodwill towards you in as they leave you satisfied.

One day those studios will face a situation like this and they might share some client love by referring them you to them.

Other, Less Effective Ways To Get Work

Referrals are the best ways to get work going on and on. In here trust is already established. But we can’t just sit on our hands and wait for the phone to ring. The following are some of the ‘other’ ways to get jobs.

R.F.Ps

Many big organizations issue R.F.Ps to hire studios for design work. These are good jobs to go after. None in design business goes on without having to deal with an R.F.P in their career. If someone is telling such things to you, they are lying. There are several ways you can go through to handle R.F.Ps.

Usually, R.F.Ps come with a contact number that you can use in case if you have questions. Call up, get in touch with the person who wrote the R.F.P. If possible arrange a meetup. They might even have heard about you. Make friends and gather much detail you can about the organization that issued the R.F.P.

You will come across R.F.Ps that are of prescriptive nature. It is usually because they are freaking out about wanting to have to hire designers. In such case call the person in charge and strike up a conversation.

Sometimes you come across R.F.Ps that even dictate the colour of the buttons. It’s generally a cry for help and you are being provided an opportunity to develop mutual understanding between you and them. Speaking directly to the designer in charge is what is generally needed than sending out replies to poorlyscriptedR.F.Ps. Moreover, how do you think organizations decide who to send R.F.Ps to? It’s by referrals. Surprised much?

Outbound Contacts

It’s natural to want to work for clients; even if they don’t have work at the moment. To be realistic it’s like trying to find an oasis in a desert. With that being said, if you find a client to be very interesting to work with, go after them. If you have developed a substantial network you will know someone you know, who knows someone in that organization.

So meet up with that someone you know and buy those drinks or meals (their choice) and strike a conversation. With a bit of luck, you might be sitting in front of the right person. In such a case you have to go ahead with your pitch. (Put your head in a bucket!) Just kidding. Make a lasting impression. Potential clients do like getting cold calls. So, don’t hesitate.

Try Advertising

Advertising is a good way to make yourself visible to the world. But I do not recommend throwing money away into it. A while back we had an opportunity to sponsor a party. Had we paid 5 grand we could have gotten our brand name on the banner.

But we didn’t have any free money during that time. So we decided to print our logo on stickers and distributed them while the party was going on. It only cost us a minuscule 50 bucks and it was a hit. We had really great publicity that night.

So, host a party, buy ads in the conference brochure, etc. occasionally. Make yourself visible in places where potential clients frequent. But, don’t throw your money away.

Attend Conferences

If you want to meet fellow designers or potential clients, conferences are the place to be. People working in big organizations who can afford to be at conferences flood these events. Usually, they are more likely to spend on dinner for a whole table of guests. Find a bunch you feel catty enough to be with and have fun. Moreover, most of the organizations that are part of such conferences are the big ones who issue R.F.Ps and someone forms the higher ups. People who make crucial decisions is never far from such events.

Blog Frequently

Another best way to carve your own sphere of influence on the internet is to blog about things you like. Blog about your design ideas (not the specifics, of course) but do give away good ideas that are just ahead of the curb and something you can do with your eyes closed. Such posts not only increase your online following but also enhance your influence on your craft among fellow online peers.

Usually, people who matter (the ones who make decisions in the big organizations, who you wish to be your client) may be following you.  Observing your actions online. Imbibing in your expertise. Also, you can inspire young designers. All good and positive propaganda for you.

With a blog, you not only communicate with the world what you like but also show them how confident you are about your craft. When you are being vetted for quality, by your clients; blogs help you big time and they are just as invaluable to you as referrals are.

So, blog about your crafts and things you like about. All these will help you fight the Bear better.

It’s Honesty That Builds Trust

by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 21, 2017 | Business, Marketing | 0 comments

Almost all products that are available these days are the best to have, easiest to use, smartest by technology, most gorgeous, exceptionally cost-effective and the most affordable things you could ever buy. They all increase your profits, lower your costs and save your time.

You just have to make your decision to choose one and no matter what you pick, it will be the perfect thing! That’s what everyone whoever is selling something tells these days.

Our content is filled with such qualifiers as we constantly look around to figure out what everyone out there is doing to sell better. We compare everything, from websites to portfolios. Towards identifying how different our features and interfaces are formed by our competitors.

After surveying everything out there, we try to be ‘special’ or ‘different’ from them by telling people how ‘unique’ we are. We also advocate how better we are than others. This is just like a consultant boasting about their unique processes.

Companies designing graphics which shows a comparative study of features and benefits of their products over their competitors. This results in the shifting of the context of the conversation towards factors that are external and beyond control. What others (your competition) do online is of no interest to your users.

To succeed, you have to have your user’s trust. Which can only be obtained through truth?. Which cannot be those fancy qualifiers that fill up your content or the design graphics on the differences between your products and others?. It’s honesty that builds trust.

We should stop us over-dependence on these qualifiers and graphics and start being real. Stop telling only how different you are and start telling what you are first, what you are capable of doing, what you are offering and why your users should choose you.

The Test

To establish trust with your users you should cut the unrealistic things out and be real throughout your content. I achieve this through ‘The Test’. And my mom is my judge in my version of the test. My mom brought me to this earth and she has known me all my life. She knows me well enough to tell point out whether am being honest or not. She always points out to me when am being unrealistic or bullshitting.

I was applying for a job and I had written a cover letter filled with jargons. I wasn’t getting any offer and one day I was whining about this to my mom and she asked me to show her the content of the letter. After reading it she asked me questions about a few of those jargon words that I had used in that cover letter which gave the impression of me being a smartass.

I realized the mistakes I made. I filled the cover letter with words which are only familiar among writers. Not the common man. I re-wrote the letter by replacing the jargons with appropriately simplified words.

To my surprise, I had responses from almost all the places I had applied to and got a job soon after. Afterward, whenever I was writing content I put my content through the Mom Exam to check whether it will pass or not.

The point is to get the content written in such a manner that is understandable to your users. There is no point in including technical or jargons when the content makes no sense to your readers. You are writing the content so that your users can understand what you are trying to convey and not show off how well versed you are with vocabulary. So always read out your content to yourself or a person who calls you on your bullshit.

It doesn’t always have to be your mom. For me, it was my mom and to you, it could be your Dad or cousin or wife or girlfriend. With their help try to learn whether your content makes sense to your users. That it conveys all the information to your users without clutter.

Make sure you put your content through the test and it comes out with flying colors. Otherwise, you have to start over or to tweak it enough for it to be understandable to everyone.

Get Real

After many years I still use the Test. The only difference is that it comes to the beginning of the whole process of creating my content. Here is how I do it.

• I try to understand my audience/users.
• Through research, I figure out how my users behave.
• What all are their assumptions?
• Will they understand what I am creating?
• Will they like and approve of it?
• Dumb down the content as much as possible so that everyone can understand.

You have to understand your users/audience. Know what type of content they like and what they disliked and what makes them come here for more of your content. Figure this out and almost all your problems in content creation are over.

Analyze your user behavior. For example, assume the scenario where you are asked by your client to write some blog posts. You should go to the said blog and go through the content and look in the comments section to see how the users reacted to that particular content.

There will be all sorts of responses. Only take away what is relevant to your work. If the responses are good then understand that the users like similar content and crave for it. If the response is negative you should go through the content to figure out what caused the users to provide negative content and you yourself have to keep away from making such mistakes.

Here is where the test helps. I understand my users and create a mental picture where my mom simulates my users. I would create the content and go through it after I am done and make sure that my mom approves of it.

This helps in two ways. Firstly my mom will point out to me when am being too difficult to understand or in other words use jargons with my content. Also, my assumption about the user behavior will help me weed out any portion of the content that would end up being disliked by my users. Thus the test helps in writing appropriate and easy to understand the content.

This Will Help You Understand Better

For the time being, think that you are running a company which does web development. You want your potential customers to pick you. For that you put up a page on your website called ‘Our Approach’ to make your potential customers understand how great you are:

We don’t trust our solution unto you. Instead, we listen to your business needs. Afterward, our experienced team gets working to implement the appropriate technology to support your requirements and help you achieve your goals.

You have to understand one thing clearly. This page is to target your potential customers and to get them to trust you. Let’s apply ‘the test.’ For me my mom would be the judge and after reading it she would have felt these.

• I like this type of approach.
• I understand how technology is influential in my business.
• I think using a cookie-cutter approach is inferior to my website.
• I only hire teams with experience.

As a conclusion of ‘the test’, I can understand that these are very business oriented. My mom wouldn’t understand things like that nevertheless say them. Now she would be saying things more realistic like the following:

• I don’t want to feel like an idiot.
• I hire people who I trust.
• I want to have a say or two about the final output.
• I want to feel valued.
• I am nervous about making this decision.

After the test, my user assumptions are very realistic and I can rewrite the whole content on the ‘Our Approach’ page as follows.

Some Clients want us to take lead and deliver fast results. Others want to work with us providing input and suggesting changes and getting things right. Whatever your preference is, we will accommodate you and perform our best towards delivering the desired result.

Do you think the content is Cheesy? Perhaps. But does it pass the Test? You bet your cash. Simple and easy for everyone to understand. To have the information conveyed to everyone is just what you need and so does your client.

Your person whom you are having a judge may not be your target, but that person is real. You can count on that person to call on your bullshit. That’s what this test is all about. Forming real assumptions and then writing your content based on those assumptions to be as close to reality to deliver the expected result.

Having real assumptions firstly enables us to write real content. But usually, we don’t follow this approach. We work the other way around. In doing so we are actually trying to answer a question which doesn’t exist. “If we answer first and question later, we aren’t trying to communicate anything.”

By assuming about your audience, knowing about their likes and dislikes, their turn-ons and turn-offs; you could write the content that is closer to reality and better conveys the message, if not already, it were the best method to do so.

Don’t Be One In A Million, Stand Out!

Don’t be the same as everyone. Sameness is a problem.

The challenge we face here is time. Building trust takes time. But we can’t wait around for the time. We are content creators and we are on tight deadlines. We only have a tiny fraction of our user’s time to convey our worth to them.

We can’t overcome this by applying any formula. Which is exactly what we have been taught since childhood. It’s because of this approach we are seeing every car company being the “best in class”, every communications network operator has got the “most coverage” and why all consultancies are at “full service.”

Why pressure your users to make choices based on the absolutes which are the same your competitors claim they have or they are?

Let me tell you about the time I went out to get a TV. I went to an electronics retailer in my locality who dealt with multiple brands. I listened to sales pitches which contained jargons like “smart technology”, “D.L.N.A” etc. I don’t know what they meant. Neither did they dumb it down. And when I asked an on-topic question like, “Does it come with a stand?” I got a reply from the sales person that I couldn’t go wrong whether I choose a Samsung or an LG.

I returned home exhausted and confused and very much embarrassed that I couldn’t make a decision about buying a TV. I felt like an idiot for knowing less and not being able to understand all the technical jargons that were thrown at me.

After a while, I got online and looked at TVs in Amazon and found one with thousands of positive reviews from users. There were all sorts of discussions about the particular model. Real people talking and exchanging information about that TV. I finally learned what those jargons meant and thanks to those people who were kind enough to have explained about it in the comments section.

I got that TV. White-gloved delivery after two days I ordered it and at half the price and twice the warranty period. I was able to trust myself that I was right when I was ordering it and I still stand by the decision. That made me happy.

Instead of what every other salesperson did, had that sales representative explained what features the TV had instead of jargon stuffing his statements I might have walked away with a TV form that shop. Instead, I left with embarrassment and feeling belittled because of my lack of knowledge on the technical matters.

The take away here is, “You should be very simple and to the point while creating content. Don’t just copy your competition.”

Write Real Stuff

Not every one of us has thousands of reviews to go through to figure out what you are supposed to do. But we do have our assets. They are not flashy. They are not perfect. But they are our assets and they make us stand apart.

For a designer, it might have been the sketch you created while at a coffee shop or the one you created while at a boring conference.

For a developer, it might have been the app that got downloaded 50 plus times and got 5-star review consistently.

For small start-ups, it might be the adorable blog post your ex-intern wrote acknowledging the amazing experience he/she had. All of us have our own assets. Find yours. Stop wasting your energy of creativity, on fluff. Write real stuff that passes ‘the Test.’

If you need the inspiration to ask for it. Ask your users or employees or clients or colleagues or your friends about this question. Ask them why they trust you? Why they trust your company? You can bet your cash that their answers won’t include confusing jargon like “cross-platform”, “portability”, “D.L.N.A” etc.

They will be using plain and simple language full of emotional adjectives that explain how confident or how happy they are. These are those words that end up making your day. It’s because people don’t get a chance to edit themselves when they tell you about your awesomeness. It’s the moment when they are being real and candid.

I once asked a client of mine, “You have been working with me for a long time? Why do you keep on working with me?” He told, “You understand what I want very quickly. I just need to have a very short conversation to convey myself and you work your magic. I suspect this involves mushrooms and other hallucinogens.”

The reality is something harmless entirely: I just work hard and make it look easy. He knows that very well and conveyed himself in an unabashedly funny way. He also described two of my assets. My ability to understand things quickly and to create great content.

Real things are simple and specific. People who real tend to be simple to understand and be specific. Use it as your hallmark at work. Be real, be simple, de-jargon your content, don’t look at your competition and copy their tactics to make awesome content. It’s in you. You just have to find your asset and put it to use.

Being real gains you others’ trust and you have to believe in that to succeed in getting it.

Future Proof Content

by Ahmed Muzammil | Jul 21, 2017 | Business, Marketing | 0 comments

Our future is supple and we have to be flexible enough to thrive. More and more internet-enabled devices of various shapes and sizes are being introduced into the market. Our content has to be designed with forethought so that it will remain accessible with all the details over a multitude of gadgets.

Irrespective of your craft, be it web designing or web developing or user interface designing; all need to pay attention. The Content of the future is going everywhere. Embrace this reality shift. Erstwhile web pages were only designed for the desktops. Now the content needs to work across desktops, phones, tablets etc. with varying form factors and resolutions.

The solution to this content strategy issue of the future requires architectural, technical and editorial knowledge.

Prepare Structured Content

To understand structure we are not going delve into technical information on DITA, XML, RDF, Microdata etc. because it’s just not about metadata and mark-up. It’s about what metadata and mark-up stand for, what they mean. In order to achieve this we need to have a framework to make better decisions about structure. This will aid us in taking on the technical challenges and be productive.

#1. Be Purposeful

Websites are designed to cater to the needs of both the organization and the end user. Their needs have to be applied with respect to the various types of content like articles, blog posts, product description resources etc. For achieving the aforementioned, the following needs to be accomplished.

• Does this type of content cater to the overall goal we are trying to achieve?
• Is this what the user wants?
• What does the organization gain by publishing this?
• What does the organization expect out of the end user?

As imperative as it is to establish site goals prior to making a design decision, it’s absolutely necessary to be aware of what is expected out of the content. This will help in ensuring that no matter what type of form the content adapts to as a result of the type of gadget it’s being viewed upon, it always delivers the intended outcome.

#2.Be Micro

Get to know the content at hand by paying attention to every micro detail. Irrespective of what type of content it is, be it article or poem or food recipe; it helps in breaking down the content to its basic ingredients. These basic ingredients will vary from content to content.

Nevertheless, they have to be identified. They are little pieces of information like title, the body of content, excerpt about the main article, table of contents, quotes, captions, links to related articles, by-lines form author, reviews from readers, images, videos etc.

It’s better to have an information architect at hand to break down the content to its core components. But all members of the team need to pay attention. This will help in the decision-making process so as to how to design the flow of data on the platform so that it responds as expected on any device irrespective of its display’s form factor and resolution.

#3. Be Meaningful

After understanding the basic ingredients or the building blocks to your content it is necessary to comprehend the part played by each block. Which block is absolutely essential, which is not, which adds value and which can be neglected or which is of lesser importance?

This understanding will be the determining factor behind the organization of the content when it comes to various screen sizes and aspect ratios. The following has to do in order to accomplish this.

• How much does each block contribute towards achieving the purpose of the whole content?
• What value of the content is lost if a particular block goes away?
• What relationships exist between the different content blocks?

To be highly thorough; research extensively on the goals of the organization, current patterns of content use, needs of the end user etc. before the beginning.

Consider this scenario. The client is a website which relies on culinary articles to attract users to generate money with advertising. For the sake of this example let the site be ‘reciepies.com‘. Each culinary article from the site has a title, teasers about the recipe, attribution to publication, date of publication, teaser, images, list of ingredients, preparation techniques, and proper description, pairing with appropriate Wine, reader ratings and reviews etc.; all in respective order.

The purpose of the client is to increase page views to generate or increase advertising revenue. For this, the users must frequent the client’s website. This requires the articles to be food related, to the point and to captivate the audience with the writing. So that they feel compelled to visit the site, again and again, to read about more recipes that they can try out and enjoy.

While contemplating the above, some interesting revelations emerge:

• All parts of the article are not necessary and reducing the non-essential parts will reduce the clutter. But it will also produce an unnecessary by-product of a reduced number of page visits by end users.
• Assume a situation where the website has a sidebar and moving it to the middle of the content in case of small screens will frustrate the audience.
• Reducing the image will reduce the length of the content and some orientation issues but it will also reduce the interest of the audience on the recipe.
• Eliminating the teasers will definitely save space but it will reduce the interestingness of the content/recipe amongst the readers.

These are part of revelations because they have great influence on the end user behaviour. The Absence of the essential features will result in decreased user activity caused by reduced page clicks. Resulting in reduced revenue output for the client. The opposite of what the client wants to achieve.

Also, there is the other side of the argument. In many popular designs, the sidebar is pushed to the bottom for gadgets with small screens. But it is inappropriate for all websites. In case of movie review sites or a culinary site like‘www.recipies.com, from the example, the readers would like to immediately know the ratings of the content they are about to read at the beginning of the content.

Pushing down the sidebar with the review would make it literally useless. Also frustrating the end user by forcing him/her to scroll to the end of the article to vital information which should have been included at the beginning of the article. Such an approach is poor design practice.

Once design practice doesn’t apply to all websites. So, all data blocks have to be placed where they all are respectively more meaningful. This is a design practice which is appropriate for both clients and end users.

#4. Be Organized

Being organized always pays off. Some website publishers use Content Management System (CMS) to handle the hassle related to publishing content online. But the presence of CMS doesn’t eliminate the problems associated with publishing content for devices with various aspect ratios and resolutions.

Some CMS might advocate that they solve this very problem but when cross-platform publishing is involved the solution offered might not be delivering a 100% satisfaction all the time. One of the well-developed CMS belongs to NPR [National Public Radio]. They applied the ‘Create Once, Publish Everywhere’ strategy. At NPR each story had to be entered into a discrete set of fields within the CMS and then the whole content is made available by an API for multiple platforms simultaneously.

The NPR CMS supports lots of content elements. But according to Zach Brand, head of technology at NPR it essential enough to just provide the CMS with a title, teaser, description, and Dateline. Other features like audio, images or by-lines are optional.

The takeaway from here is the Content Management with Strategic Approach. But the following must incorporate the checklist when CMS is involved.

• The CMS should have inbuilt analytics to understand and analyse your content.
• The attributes of the blocks of the content that goes into the CMS should be well defined.
• The limitations of the CMS should be always accounted for.
• The technical team should be provided with thoughtful and precise instructions about the requirements of the CMS.

It’s just enough to be just done with what is required when managing a basic website is in question. But when it comes to content that is shared across many types of gadgets and channels CMS is critical to success and ease of deployment.

#5. Be Structured

Technology isn’t mature enough to make decisions yet. But it will be an invaluable asset in implementing good practices for the user. Structuring content requires the use of code and all content editors are not experts in developing. Several tools are available that can help structure the content with XML.

XML is a simple mark-up that provides content with structure and meaning when deployed in the absence of database. DITA designed by IBM, HTML 5, they all help in providing structure to content. Slight touch of the structure with the content is rewarding in its own way. Several tools are available that can be used without the knowledge or know how to code.

Use the tool that provides the best structural output for the project. But always be structured.

Breathe Life Into Structure

The work that goes into the content matters more than the mark-up that structures it. The work breathes life into the structure. Without the well-researched content, the structure is just frames and tags in empty space. The bottom line that always prevailed has been meaningful content.

Getting the content future proof is not ensuring that it will be displayed properly across various gadgets or to ensure that is well structured. It’s also not relying on microdata to resolve your problems. The best place to begin to make your content future proof is, to begin with, the content itself. Analyse the various elements of the content and document the relationships between the various blocks. Make the various blocks join together in such a way that as a whole they deliver a great meaning.

Technology and Standards will be changing and evolving forever. But all are there to deliver the great meaning that the content was intended to deliver. Embrace this thinking and propel content with great meaning and insight. Great content will live on into the future.