Tuesday 15 October 2013

Easy Tips to Increase your Website Subscribers

To start with, building a website or writing a blog and publishing it might be an easy task but one major challenge is getting traffic and readers on site. If your content is compelling and informative, then readers will automatically get attracted, since the major search engine like Google are smart enough and give positive credit to good content. There are numerous articles available on how to increase website traffic on internet which can considerably help in getting in depth knowledge on the subject.

Writing good content perhaps one challenge but converting your readers to subscribers your newsletters is another challenge. So further in this article we will see effective tips on how you can increase subscribers which can ultimately increase your site traffic!

1: Your Site Subscribe Form

Place your subscriber form at several places on your site. Keep it easily visible on various pages. Allow your visitors to subscribe from any place in your website. For example, you can place it on footer of your website so it can be visible on every page by readers.

Don’t add too many fields, readers don’t like to subscribe for the services asking too much information. Keep it short and simple like add only reader email id, name and phone number (optional) into your subscriber form. Allowing readers subscribe your service using only email id is well and good. Don’t burden your readers and just ask required fields only to fill up form. 

Show you latest products and services on your subscription form, this might help increase your conversion as well.

2: Email Marketing

E mail marketing is proven technique to increase traffic. Send personalized email to your potential subscribers. Your subject line must be striking and simple, entice readers to subscribe your services. Make sure you send email to your subscribers only and at a decent frequency otherwise too many unsolicited email can provoke your subscribers to leave your services.

3: Social Networking Medium

Start sharing you quality content in your social groups like Facebook, Twitter and Google +. Quality and informative content usually gets appreciation by social geeks; this will increase scope of reaching your content to millions of people thus more chances of subscribers for your website increase aptly. The more freely you come up with your audience, the more your audiences prefer to invest into your services.
  
4: Guest Posting

One another effective way to increase subscribers is to publish you content by Guest Posting, this would impressively improve your subscribers and bring targeted group on your website. This is one of best opportunity to lure targeted audience and increase quality traffic on your website. If you are providing great value on a reputed website of your niche, it only makes sense that, within very short time you will increase your subscribers incredibly and traffic as well. This helps in building up your reputation and people value your contribution which eventually affects your website traffic in a good manner.
          
5: Don’t Charge

Naturally, everyone would get attracted to something which is free. Doesn’t matter how creative and effective writer you are its common sense to allow your readers to subscribe to newsletter service for free. This would attract more and more subscribers.
   
6: Effective Landing Page

The landing page of your website or your blog must be as much compelling as possible. Show informative and latest contents on your landing page. Running an Adwords campaign is also a good option in order to draw target audience and quality traffic to your website by doing effective keyword research.

Do you have desire to run your Email marketing campaign effectively, go through this Few basic rule when Sending Promotional emails and gain immense traffic on your website.

About Author: Sem Jacobs is an expert web developer at KGN Technologies. KGN Technologies is a team of talented and expert magento developers offers cost-effective and complete magento web solutions.

Friday 27 September 2013

Steps to Get Started with Small Business

Establishing business requires patience, passion, 100% dedication and hard work. Pulling these all elements into an action can rewards in unlimited profit and strong reputation. With bounty of new technology and wealth of information available on web, there has never been so easy or best time for entrepreneurs to start small business. There are many experienced and established business owners often would share their experiences and difficulties they had faced, this information can be inspiration for new entrepreneurs to start small business.

Step 1

Before starting business, you require to perform the sufficient research and analysis. Make sure the business topic you select must be future proof and will earn you at least money require to sustain business in down economy. Well there is no business is secured and safe, risk is an inevitable element of business. Analyzing your competitors and audiences will help you build strong strategies to keep your business a step ahead in competition.

Step 2

Starting business never been so easy especially if the whole business procedure comes in handling of single person only. You may be so smart or intelligent but you may not be so capable to endure the challenges and real risks involved in business especially if you are beginner. Connecting with experienced business peoples is essential to shirk the stumbling blocks that can be business killing hindrances later. Find the experienced mentor help you keep your business risk free and guide you on grow your business. You can take help of professional consultancy corps for your business assistance.

Step 3

Business structure, business failure and success is always depends on its size and its participants. If there are more than one stakeholder associate with business, then make sure you have legal agreement signed that includes who will share what percentage of profit etc. Since this is your fresh start, make sure you don’t rush into it and don’t attempt of target the entire worlds. Limit your business range as this will help you build strong and effective strategies if you know who your audiences are.

Step 4

Name of your business tells your customers who you are and what the purpose of your business is. Business name is one of the most essential aspects in starting small business. The name you select will help your potential customers to presume your services. Business name represent the image of your business and surely you want the image expressed clearly to your potential customers. Your business name carries the powerful energy that can help you create a huge success.

Step 5

Since you are planning to set up small business you either require acquiring finance from bank or venture capitalist. Successful and effective business plan will increase sources of getting finance for your business. Business plan will help you determine whether your business idea is feasible. Because your business plan includes exactly what your strategies are and what you have plan to run the business, effectively written business plan help convince your investors and make you reliable one.

The things require most for setting up small business are: Ambition and Patience.

About Author: Sem Jacobs is working at KGN Technologies since 2009. KGN technologies is a leading bespoke ecommerce web development company involves team of passionate and hardworking PHP and Front End Developers who love to work on challenging eCommerce development projects.

Friday 20 September 2013

Important Aspects of Business Security

Important Aspects of Business Security
Every business must possess security and safety measurements in order to reduce the risk and keep business essential information vulnerable free. The term business security can refer to many aspects regarding company protection and safety. It can be the physical premises security, employee security and especially data loss prevention or it can refer to company accounts information or safeguarding computer networking system against the potential hackers who potentially try to hack the company important information.

Company bonds, stocks and investment strategy materials are the major aspects of business security. Dereliction in business security can extremely harm business and increase chance of losing important data. There are many businesses to attract the investors to invest in their strategies, give the highest priority to security and this makes it even easier for businesses to find the new investors, build new funds or capital for their firms. Financial security helps businesses build sufficient funds to run the business successfully.

Business information security includes the safety of company’s all information such as printed cheques, computer programs, employee information, marketing strategies materials, sales strategies and much more items. Business must not only take steps to prevent themselves against essential data being stolen, but also ensure the safety of their staff members and customers. For example, people who buy products online, to complete the checkout process they need to provide their credit card credentials. So now it is responsibility of companies to take all the necessary and possible actions to protect and keep secure credentials of their buyers.

Business personal security is a concern of businesses in that they must take necessary steps and follow laws pertaining to employee safety and security. Keeping work station safe with necessary equipments is one of the most important aspects of business personal security. It is also essential that the business management ensure the work place is safe and free from all types of violence and abuses. Business personal security means a safe environment for all company members as well as for company’s property.

Business loss prevention or theft is also one of the big concerns for all types of businesses. Most retailers to prevent from shoplifters or robbers use the video cameras. This approach helps retailers to keep their shop safe secure against shoplifters and catch them quickly. While shoplifting is one of the big problems for retail stores, wholesale companies also need to possess the necessary security precautions to prevent theft.

Business security also includes limiting access to the company’s essential section such as file section where all the essential data of company is stored. Only managers and few employees are allowed to access company’s important sections to prevent business against important information loss. Heavy duty doors, window bars, burglar alarms are common commercial security measures often used by retail, corporate, and wholesale companies.

About Author: Sem Jacobs is senior web developer working at KGN technologies. KGN Technologies is a leading magento eCommerce development firm has a great passion for working on ever evolving web technology and their team has gained extensive experience in developing customized, responsive and creative eCommerce websites. 

Wednesday 18 September 2013

Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Your eCommerce Project

When it comes to building an eCommerce website you have typically two options to choose from: either built it on your own or hire someone expert from outside (usually called Insourcing and Outsourcing). Well, these both options make sense in certain situations. If you have adequate technical and programming knowledge then you can better start building your eCommerce site your own, since there are tons of ready to use free themes and software’s available on the web (such as WordPress, Magento and Joomla) which extremely reduces the development work, efforts and time. The obvious advantage of building site on your own is that you can shape your eCommerce store just the way you imagine about it. At the same time, if you want your store to shine over your competitors, have elegant user-friendly functionality with smooth performance and covering all basic technical aspects, its absolutely worth investing in hiring professional web development firm to take care of your project.

Outsourcing has risks but it has benefits too. We are going to highlight its pros and cons in this article.

What is Outsourcing?

When you hire an outside expert, service provider or any professional organization to meet particular business needs or to manage a portion of project such as eCommerce development is called as outsourcing.

Following are the reasons to outsource your eCommerce project:

Outsourcing is an eminent concept which has been appreciated by organization across the globe and often recognized as cost-effective tactic. It allows businesses to focus on its core competencies and off-load its non-core functions to outsourcing providers in low-cost countries such as India and many others.

  • Expert skills: By outsourcing your project to a genuine company, you will get support of expert and highly qualified professions experienced in delivering satisfied results in stipulated time frames. Developing project under skilled developers ensures that your project meets all your specific business requirements.
  • Advanced tools: Due to high competition outsourcing ecommerce development companies are under immense pressure to survive and to stay in the market they must produce best results utilizing latest technical tools and resources. Hence customers can benefit from competitive costs and efficient services.Furthermore there is an ever increasing community of ecommerce developers who contribute by sharing their experience and builds nurturing the web with outstanding technical functionalities and designs.
  • Reduce in overall cost: Outsource project will tremendously reduce your overall budget as many renowned companies offers best services at reasonable cost.
  • Peace of mind: Most of the time project scope is well agreed between client and ecommerce Development Company in advance and they give fix time and cost to do development. This tremendously reduces the burden for client to continuously monitor development as they know what they are going to pay, what is going to be built and when to expect completed project. help organizations to give estimation to their clients.
  • Smooth communication: Since outsourcing companies have to deal with foreign companies, most of them are trained in speaking good English. Developers team of outsourcing companies are well experienced on how to communicate with clients. Modern technologies such as instant messengers, conference calls, video chat gives virtually close environment to interact with development team.
Cost savings is the main benefit of outsourcing ecommerce development. There are thousands of options to choose from. Some are good and some are bad. Just use your common sense to avoid falling in the trap of wrong companies. But when you strike the right chord and you have a good company you are working with – you just need to focus on expanding your business by having a strong back up of reliable ecommerce developers.” – KGN Technologies

Disadvantages of Outsourcing

The main is the reliability factor and falling in the trap of wrong company. It may hit you extremely hard in face when you realize poor quality work, no seriousness in development team about timely delivery, poor communication and inefficient project management. It will become extremely frustrating and very hard to get out of the deep crap you will fall into. So be prepared and take all necessary steps before you award your project and rely on a team to do work for you. Ask for examples, speak with them on phone, talk to their references, visit them if it is worth and find out how they work, check out infrastructure and interact with team.

Quality is another major complain. There will be lapses and you will need to raise the bar to achieve the standard you expect.  The best approach is to agree and confirm what type of TESTING companies will perform. If you need any specific configuration testing let them know. In short a complete guideline on quality standards has to be put in front of development team.

Poor communication and delay in delivery are also common issues. Ensure that the company you work with have staff fluent in English communication and they understand your project requirement perfectly. Set a target deadline to deliver the project with you with testing.

About Author: Sem Jacobs is working at KGN Technologies as web developer. KGN technologies offers pixel perfect and validated PSD to HTML conversion services.

Friday 13 September 2013

Essential Tips to Get Best from Your Designer

Design that can be either web design, responsive design or logo design, these all demands collaboration and effective communication throughout the process in order to attain positive outcomes. Design is simply just not to know how to use particular software but rather it more to do with coming up with new and creative concepts and ideas that can help business grow. It’s about establishing a brand in the market.

Designers are an important asset for any web development firm. They could be a huge profit-driven factor if you are able to get best results from their skills and creativity. Keeping light environment and striking the right balance between team could give the designers the creative freedom to come up with fresh and unique concepts every time. 

In order to get the most from your designer, following are the few wonderful tips you should consider while working with them:

Make them believe, you trust them

Since you are dealing with your designers’ expertise and skills, make them allow helping you. It is obvious that your designer probably knows more about design and its visual impacts on customers you do. Hence it is necessary that you should give them the same professional courtesy. Obviously directing them and laying out thoughts is one aspect but giving them freedom to come up with designs is normally more useful. Do brainstorming, tell them what inspires you, what results you want, who is your target, share examples of designs you like and just let them come up with concepts based on these discussion. 

Be clear with your needs

It’s often seen that, clients get confused and they keep on changing their requirements specially when it comes to designs. Hence, it is your responsibility to suggest them what will be best for their business. Collect all the details top to bottom, and then discuss with your designer. Keep in mind that you first understood your client requirements so that you can explain in more effective manner to your designer. Here you need to give clear direction including starting point to further process. Give clear explanation to your designer, arrange meeting every time when needed to clear out misunderstanding in design. This will ultimately helps your client to achieve best of the best design from your designer since they clearly know what they have to perform.

Give visual ideas

Since, your designer can probably gauge about what can make design even effective but providing ideas from other websites from other companies you have seen will help your designer identify inspirations you are seeking. Sending visual clues to designer will help them get better visual picture of your preferences.

Give specific feedback

Don’t just say, ‘it is not good’, ‘I don’t like it’ and ‘make it better’ kind of pathetic feedbacks. Such feedbacks are worthless and it is not going to add any value that the designer can work with. If you are not satisfied with layout color and idea, then clearly mention all the elements bugging you. A design can be single minor change away from perfection, so be specific with your needs and help designer locate problems with design by avoiding obscure and deceptive responses.

About Author: Sem Jacobs on the post of senior web developer at KGN Technologies. He also contributes in marketing team of KGN Technologies as he has excellent marketing skills and knowledge. KGN Technologies is leading magento ecommerce development agency offers robust, reliable and complete magento web solutions.    

Thursday 12 September 2013

A Good Customer Service Ensures Business Stability and Maintains Consumer Trust

Effective Customer Services
A simple and common sense about business success is to treat customer like a KING. Remember your business survives and grows when you have customers. Your products and services must be developed, sold and supported in such a way that your customers are satisfied and happy about doing business with you.  Your business needs your customers and the more effort you make to make their life hassle free with your business – your growth will have direct positive implications due to this. Recommendations, references, word of mouth itself will result in more inquiries and sales. Your marketing will just act as a support and will feel less pressure as more and more business flows from your good customer service.

Following are few essential tips about customer service: 

Keep in touch with your customer

Whether you are having good time or bad times in business ensuring that you stay in touch regularly with your customers is absolutely important. There are numerous ways through which you can stay in touch. News updates and email, organizing events, gifts or wishes on festivities, special loyalty discounts etc. There is much more you can do. Be creative in your approach. Always attend, reply and address to any phone calls, emails or any form of message you receive from your customers. When you have sold them something follow up and confirm if they are happy using your products or if they are facing any issues. Attend any support or maintenance requests promptly. Give them acknowledgement straight away that you have received their message and let them know the time when they will get attended.  All these are simple yet important things. Being in touch with your customers regularly gives them assurance that you care for them and are ready to help them all the time. This encourages them to do more business with you.

Attitude Is Everything

The person who responds to your customer’s calls should be well-trained and should possess skills to deal with customer with solutions oriented and caring attitude. Customer service representative must be prepared to face potential challenges and problems which are likely to occur and how such difficult situations must be handled. Particularly aggressive customers must be handled calmly. Make your customers feel special all the time. The quicker solution you give them chances are you will make them happy and ultimately most of the times this will help in doing more business. Overall business attitude matters a lot right from marketing to sales and post sales.

Listen Your Customer

Listening customers problems with clear mind is most important and essential aspect of customer service and if I am not wrong then it is the factor that is most overlooked by businesses. According to one study, more than 70 percentage of customer left the business due to dull response from business customer service spokesperson.

It is essential to train your customer service provider to understand customers needs, stay calm during their grievance. Listening to customer with their problems and replying them with best possible and significant answers, eventually help them in building trust with you.

Follow-up

In order to build your business and increase sales, customer service should not stop with just single call or single visit from your customer. Find out the reason if your customer left in the middle of checkout process, and send them immediate follows up alerts which can help in bringing them back and complete the half checkout process. A quick follow-up even if getting positive shopping experience from customers will be certain that you are caring about business and this will help you set above your competitors.

About Author: Sem Jacobs is a skilled web developer and online marketing expert has joined KGN Technologies in 2009. KGN Technologies is a leading magento development agency has team of expert PHP Programmers and Front End Developers who are trained to deliver pixel perfect, validated and functionally tested web projects with great professionalism in magento open source.

Thursday 22 August 2013

HTML5 – Does it really help in improving search rankings?

eCommerce development
Search Engine Optimization is really an incredible aspect which has capability to draw immense traffic and make your brand popular across wide region. With the advent of HTML5, it is necessary to weigh up the potential impact the new standards will have on search engine rankings. Does HTML5 can really impact your search rankings? This is the buzz question and has been debated in various places across the web.

Usually, most of Web SEO has been focused on the Google search engine. People trust more and expect more for better and quality results from Google competitively and most businesses running online utterly rely on Google search results. Google is the front line technology and has been early to take on HTML5, in both through their browser (Chrome) and their search platform. Well, Google has no definite purpose to favor new technology, but adopting new technology helps keep your site modern which ultimately is a positive sing when it comes to usability and SEO effect.

Will HTML5 Boost Your Site Rankings?

HTML5 contains number of new features and techniques but a harsh truth about HTML5 is, many of its features don’t have SEO impact. There are lots of debates running regarding HTML5 for SEO, many of them are misleading and most probably wrong but reality is HTML5 does affect SEO in both positive and negative way.  

Well, HTML5 semantic elements adopting into your website pages will not give your web page higher ranking but using semantic elements in right way could probably give positive effect on your web rankings. Though, there is eventually little amount of advantage added to rankings for semantic tags but we need to accept that the trivial use of semantic tags never affect the SEO. The difference would be small and most probably wouldn’t matter. The things that can really affect the SEO ranking these days are quality back links and quality content approach.

Improvements in HTML5 for SEO

HTML5 for Content Categorization

One significant improvement in HTML5 that could improve your SEO rankings is the ability to categorize the content with tag like <article>, <header> <footer > and <aside>.  Dividing page into different sections helps search engines easy to categorize the content. Since search engines are getting smarter and applying page segmentation and treat every part as separate entry, HTML5 is ideal one to use. The introduction of <nav> tag in HTML5 should help search engine quickly figure out the site structure which ultimately helps in faster site indexing and better opportunity to rank higher.

Treat Media Content Effectively


Earlier web designers were totally dependnt on plugins to add multimedia content on website. However, the problem with the websites those have adopted such method of adding rich graphic content through plugins on their sites is, they were suffering from very poor rankings because of inability of Google to index these types of content. But the scenario has totally changed with HTML5. HTML5 enrich making use of graphic content into websites through <video> and <audio> tags and these tags help Google to index these content quicker. These tags help Google to understand the rich media content used in website.

Added Advantage – More Meaningful Links

HTML5 has introduced large number of additional options for ‘rel’ attribute. Well, these options will identically help search engines to identify how to treat the links. This activity can provide greatly enhanced search results.

Newly added ‘rel’ attribute are:

License, alternate, bookmark, help, author, next, noreferrer, nofollow, prev, prefetch, search, tag

Final Words:

Even though, there are huge debates going on web world about HTML5 for SEO, reality remains that there are pros and crons of HTML5 on SEO. Even though it does help in pushing up the rankings, it’s still not very clear what level of impact HTML5 has on SEO. But it’s advisable to go for HTML5 because there seems to be more positive things and further enhancement in technology is going to take it forward  in being favorable for search engines .

About Author:  is a creative web developer working at KGN Technologies since 2009. KGN Technologies involves experienced magento extension development team who are capable to develop and further customize Magento extensions to add fresh and unique flair to magento shop.

Friday 2 August 2013

What’s the Fuss Around about HTML5!

HTML5 has been a popular trend over last few years now and has encouraged web developers to build a website which should be high in performance and accessibility.

Before we start talking about HTML5, it is necessary to first discuss little bit of HTML. Well, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is a type of code that can be easily read by your web browser in order to display web pages properly. There was a time when developers were completely relying on HTML for preparing web documents and although as the time has passed and technology has evolved there wasn’t really any significant improvement in the basic HTML technology. This encouraged the developer’s team to come up with necessary improvements in this language that could be good to increase the website usability and performance which eventually resulted in the birth of HTML5.

HTML5 is a new version of HTML 4.1 and XHTML 1.0 focusing on the features which makes website building process even faster. HTML5 is still a work in progress but possibly HTML5 would get the green single from W3C in July 2014.

HTML5 has so many new syntactical features such as <audio>, <video> and <canvas> elements. As a result of these new features, it will be very easy to integrate multimedia and graphic content in website using the third party plugins. There are few other considered elements like <article>, <header>, <nav> and <section> which will improve the semantic value of the document.

Search Engine Friendly

Using flash to embed video on website is often loved by web developers. But search engines think differently.  Major robot crawlers find it very hard to read the content available in flash video. Without the support of SWFobject technology, search engines are clueless about video on website. But HTML5 <video> tag has changed the entire scenario and now with <video> tag you can embed video in your website as easy as like adding an image – no flash required.

With HTML5 developers can get lot of new elements and tags that help to improve SEO. Defining the content types using different attributes is one of the key steps to improve the search ranking of web pages. For instance, we need to define whether the block of content is heading, paragraph, price and address etc. This will help search engine to understand the content available on the page which ultimately results into fast indexing of web pages because search engines like to index the web pages that follow clean and clear structure.

Audio and Video Support

As mentioned above web developers used to depend a lot for embedding videos on website through flash, Flex, Silverligh and JavaScript tools. But HTML5 has been completely eradicated this comlexity and it has become extremely easy for developers to embed video and audio files using <audio> and <video> tag. Using HTML5 web developers can embed high quality videos, audio, high definition pictures, animation and charts and much more multimedia features easily without help of any third party plugins. 

Clean and Improved Code

HTML5 enable web designers to use neat and clear code. Many div tags can be removed using semantic HTML5 elements.

Enhanced Accessibility

If you really want your site to reach broad audience, you will need to design your site for easy accessibility. HTML5 is talented enough to improve website accessibility.

It does it in 2 ways – using semantics and ARIA.

Semantic HTML means HTML tags used in web page that describes the meaning of content rather than its presentation. The decoration of content will go in CSS section.

ARIA is a part of W3C WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) which is used to make sure web content should be accessible easily. ARIA is used for improving the accessibility of dynamic content and advanced UI controls which are developed using HTML, JavaScript, AJAX and HTML and other related technologies.

Smarter Local Storage

Website cannot work without internet connection. But with HTML5, data can be stored in browser that means you can continue to perform your work, place orders and filling up form which can be sync up when you are online later.

Mobile Ready

As we can notice a rapid increase in mobile devices usage for internet browsing, adopting HTML5 technology will make your website mobile ready. As Adobe announced the death of mobile flash, HTML5 could be perfect option to make your website mobile browsing compatible. As mobile browsers have fully supported HTML5, in that case creating website mobile ready is become so easy.

Sem Jacobs is a expert front end developer who has successfully delivered above 100+ PSD to HTML conversion projects. He has excellent coding technique and write own code which ensures bug free, pixel perfect and quality web solutions.