5 tips to help you lead your team to success

5 tips to help you lead your team to success
Managing a team is rarely an easy task. Coordinating workflows, setting expectations, dealing with personality conflicts ... a manager’s work is never done. A company’s well-being relies on its manager’s ability to handle a multitude of challenges; your success as a manager will rest almost entirely on your ability to keep your team motivated while producing quality results.

While every team and department (and manager) is different, there are some management best practices that can help ensure that work teams run smoothly and employees stay happy and productive.

Here are five you may want to consider:

1. Put the right people in the right places
Make sure you know your employees’ specific strengths and skills, and match them to tasks appropriately. For example, there is no sense in asking Employee A to manage the monthly reporting charts if Employee B has more experience with Microsoft(R) Excel(R). And if you ask Employee C to deliver the customer presentation when they have a fear of public speaking, you could just be setting them up for failure.

When people’s skills are properly aligned with their responsibilities, both productivity and job satisfaction will be much higher. Be sure to actually ask your employees what they feel their strengths and weaknesses are, rather than just relying on your own judgement.

2. Results and productivity are what matters 
Unless you work in an environment where mandatory coverage during certain times is required, for example in customer service or IT help desk environments, enforcing or encouraging specific “clock in” and “clock out” times can demotivate and demean your employees. If you have hired employees that you trust, and the expectations of them are clear, there should be no reason to closely monitor when they come and go from the office as long as productivity is high and goals are being met. 

3. Don’t blame or shame
Projects don’t always go as planned. And when things go wrong, it’s tempting to look around for someone to pin the blame on. However, there’s a better way to find out what happened – and how to address problems in the future. Don’t jump to conclusions, accuse anyone or publicly criticise – instead, conduct an evaluation to determine what went awry. If specific individuals are at fault, talk to them privately to get their side of the story, and to set clear expectations for the future. 

4. Be consistent in your actions and your communication
You might be surprised how observant your employees are. They notice lots of things – and they will most likely talk amongst themselves, too. For example, if you allow one employee to leave the office early, but deny another employee the same request, it will be noticed and discussed. Likewise, the team will notice if you repeatedly praise one employee more than the others, which can cause tension and mistrust within the team. You need to ensure that you deal with each of your staff members equally and fairly.

5. Encourage teamwork and collaborative outcomes
Environments where everyone pitches in and individuals are encouraged to help each other out are usually very successful – and fun, too! So encourage your team to share ideas, talk openly, and exchange feedback. You can do that by establishing regular team meetings, holding “team building” exercises and activities, and rewarding the whole group for shared successes.

Read it in HP.com
1. SEO's Major Pit falls:


SEO Techniques are a set of specific tasks that would be performed by a Search Engine Optimization Company, when employed by a Client who desires high search engine 


positions to attract targeted traffic, with the intention of increasing their conversion rates and brand awareness. 


All of these pages, keywords and techniques need to work together so you need a plan to coordinate that, including:


Keyword research , potential keywords !


SEO Strategy (Individuals practice)


Social Networking


Site structure (matching your target keywords) and navigation to distribute link power around your site


On page SEO, Off page SEO




2. Not having a keyword:


Relevant Keywords and Quality Content are of the up most importance when implementing effective search engine optimization techniques. When a person try to search query into a Search Engine they expect exact results relating exactly to the Keywords that were entered. In order for the Search Engine to display results quickly it needs a method of Indexing its database which could contain references to billions of websites. 


So first step to Sucess / Failure starts with the KEYWORD !


3. On page, Off Page SEO:


The term "On Page" is related to and defined as the actual website domain and its content, including all sub pages. The Search Engine will base its scoring on the Quality of the Content relating to the Relevant Keywords that are visible within the pages of the site. Web pages within a site should all be unique. Individual web 


pages have the ability to create Meta Tags. 




The term "Off Page" is related to other websites that provide a Backlink to the Domain Name URLs that the Algorithm is calculating. The Search Engine will determine the relevance and quality of the website that is providing the link, and weight or score the link information accordingly. 


4. SEO - Content, Sales and Marketing team goes hand by hand ! 
when one hand fails, rest will fail too !!


New content without SEO to maximize the number of target visitors seeing that content is a waste. SEO without marketing to convert those visitors is a waste. Your content, SEO and marketing should work together as part of a process. 


5. Reports / Analytics - Never Ignore !


You have to monitor response eg, how much time users spends time in the site / page ? How many buy your product or signing up to your newsletter ? How many enquires has reached the sales team ? Also do Monitor traffic, rankings and response for relevant searches. 


If you are getting good or bad results you need to act appropriately. 


6. Unsupportive content management systems


By choosing a poor CMS, you end with a poor navigation & content flow, which would in return affect the ranking as well. If you want to drive in rain without getting wet, buy a car than opting for scooter.


8. Take control of your website.


By letting developers take control of online content is like you letting the doctor to diagonize the problem without telling the actual problem. The developer's job is to deliver the functions you want and keep the site working. What goes on the site and where and when is the responsibility of editorial and marketing, including SEO.


9. Information Architecture:


Organising functionality and content into a structure that people are able to navigate intuitively doesn’t happen by chance. Organisations must recognise the importance of information architecture or else they run the risk of creating great content and functionality that no one can ever find.


In Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites they define information architecture as:


- The combination of organisation, labelling, and navigation schemes within an information system.
- The structural design of an information space to facilitate task completion and intuitive access to content.

Social Media


As this year begins to wrap up and businesses start preparing big plans for 2011, we expect social media and technology innovations to be a bigger part of small business digital budgets. To spark a bit of creativity and help get that process rolling, we’ve gathered 35 of our most useful small business posts from the past few months to make sure businesses are in the digital know.
Each week we put together a roundup of essential social media resources that you may have missed that week — you can check those out here. But this week we decided to take it a step further and provide you with another megalist of just our top small business resources from the past few months, including social media, tech, marketing & advertising, dev & design and mobile articles written especially for our small business crowd.





Tech



Marketing & Advertising



Dev & Design



Mobile



ப்ளீஸ்! இந்தப் புத்தகத்தை வாங்காதீங்க!


"ப்ளீஸ் இந்த புத்தகத்தை வாங்காதீங்க" என்று அருமையான தலைப்பு. இந்த புத்தகத்தை வாங்குவதற்கு ஒரே காரணம் தலைப்பும், கோபிநாத்ம் தான். பொதுவாக தன்னம்பிக்கை தொடர்பான கதைகள், புத்தகங்களை படிப்பது எனக்கு ரொம்ப இஸ்டம். 

இந்த புக் ஒரு ஒளி விளக்கு, வீதி விளக்கு !! 

ப்ளீஸ்! 

- சிரிப்பு வந்தால் சிரியுங்கள்! நாளைக்கு அழுகை வந்தால் அழுது கொள்ளலாம். கொஞ்சமாக சிரித்து கொஞ்சமாக அழுவதை விட... நிறைய சிரித்து நிறைய அழுங்களேன் !
- உயிரே போனாலும் என் கொள்கையை விட்டுத் தரமாட்டேன் என்று நீங்கள் சண்டை போட்டால் அதற்குப் பெயர் கொள்கை அல்ல மனோ வியாதி !
எப்படி ? படியுங்கள் புரியும் !




இந்த உலகத்துல எல்லா பொருளுக்குமே ஒரு எக்ஸ்பயரி டேட் இருக்கும். 
அந்த எக்ஸ்பயரி டேட்டுக்குள்ளே நாம அதை நல்ல விதமா பயன்படுத்திக்கணும். 
இல்லைன்னா அது வேஸ்ட்டாயிடும். அதேமாதிரிதான் நம்ம வாழ்க்கையும். 
இதுக்கும் ஒரு எக்ஸ்பயரி டேட் இருக்கு. அது நம்ம மரணம்.
அதனால் நம்ம மரணத்துக்கு முன்பே நாலுக்கு பேருக்கு நல்லது பண்ணனும். 
இல்லைன்னா நம்ம வாழ்க்கைக்கு ! - அஜித்

Airtel Logo -- Flubber-based Logo !! 


WELL ?




Mash-up of Vodafone , Videocon, Cheap O Air brands !! The guess the new logo has totally ruined Air Tel's Brand name and the signature A.R. Rehman's tune...


Nothing has impacted them to promote or create a wave ....  Whats Airtel's move ? Am waiting ! 300 cr promotion has become a show stopper for AIRTEL !



http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/split-verdict-for-new-airtel/415678/

Web Advertising Guide:

If you operate a blog, have built a web app or are otherwise are trying to monetize a property on the web, advertising is one of the first paths that you might amble down. Let’s throw the baby in with the bathwater and say that ads will be your primary method of monetizing your idea. In that case you might need to be a little more sophisticated. This guide will step you through the process of finding the right advertisers for your site, and maximizing your revenue potential.

Types of revenue models from advertising

CPA

Cost Per Action (Affiliate) programs are sold through marketplaces like Commission Junction. These advertisements usual marked by high (sometimes very high) payouts, but the downside is that in order to make any money at all — users have to purchase the product or services from the advertising company through your site.

Typically, these types of ads perform best on high volume sites with services that compliment the product that the advertiser is trying to sell. If your site is about concert reviews, a Ticketmaster Affiliate program will perform a lot better than if your site was about Model Trains. If your site has no particular focus, Affiliates are going to be a hard sell.

I would suggest trying them out but realize that many, many times these will make you no money at all.

CPC

Cost Per Click advertisement is the first stop for many entrepreneurs looking for a way to monetize. Google Adsense is the most well known CPC vendor. The benefits of CPC are that these ad blocks are easy to set up, and they can potentially generate revenue even at small levels of traffic.

The downside to CPC advertising is that the revenue it generates is uneven because it strongly depends on ad placement location and niche your service operates in. Certain industries (typically those that sell high ticket products and services) can do really well under this model but many will find themselves with an inventory full of really low paying ads.

Typically, CPC is a good place to start until you get your feet wet; however, unless it’s consistently successful for you it does not scale as well as other options.

CPM

Cost Per Thousand advertising are what networks like Casale Media and Tribal Fusion deal in. You are paid per impression instead of for each click. Typically, for web services with high volume but relatively low engagement, this is a great option for monetization.

Not only do these networks often pay more than CPC advertising, but your payment is directly related to the number of pageviews that you get to your site. This makes it a lot easier to predict your advertising revenue from month to month.

The biggest drawbacks is that many of the good networks are difficult to get into, and the bad networks offer CPMs that are too low to be a viable revenue model. I suggest constantly shop around for better CPMs. As you grow and your audience becomes more engaged, you should be looking for networks that are willing to pay you more for that engagement.

Boutiques

BlogAds, Federated Media, and The Deck are three examples of boutique ad networks. Typically, these companies focus their attention on specific verticals and have extremely high standards in the sites that they let in. As a result, the CPMs that they pay are often substantially higher than similarly positioned networks.

In order to be considered for one of these networks, you will either have to have a service that is high profile, targets a very specific niche or extremely high volume. Since these are premium advertisers, they might also have stricter rules about how their ads can be displayed.

Usually, by the time you are ready to apply for a Boutique ad network your real question will be whether you want to outsource your sales or handle them yourself. If you decide that doing sales internally is not in your best interest, these networks are an excellent source of revenue.

Direct Sales

If you have the team, the time, and the patience the best way to make money off of ads is selling them yourself. Not only do you not have to pay an ad network a portion of what you make, but you also have complete control over how the ads will be presented and what type of advertisers that you choose to take on.

It sounds great but the big thing to remember is that selling advertising is not easy. Everything from identifying potential advertisers, to determining a price point that makes sense for your customers to providing them with the details of how well their ad is doing takes time. When you are a young company, that time might be better spent taking care of more pressing problems.

If you are ready to invest in an ad sales team, the biggest thing to remember is that advertisers pay premiums for strong verticals, high click through rate and exclusivity. When building your package, try to have one or more of these “features” as a part of it.

Understanding key terms

When shopping around for an advertising network, there are three phrases you will hear a lot. Understanding the distinction between them will save you time, effort and lost revenue.

Ad network

Examples: Adsense, Adbrite, Bidvertisers.

An ad network serves ads in a format as determined by their technology. Take a look at the three examples that I gave, you will see that each of them has a particular format of ads that they carry — whether it is Adsense’s contextual model or Adbrite’s marketplace, each network brings to the table both the technology and the creative to serve with it. Typically, ad networks have no problem filling your inventory and they pay out on a cost per click or cost per action basis.

Ad servers

Examples: Doubleclick (DART), Right Media, Atlas

An ad server is a “capsule” that tracks and displays ads. It is neither an ad network nor is it a rep agency, it’s a piece of software. Ad servers allow you to track the number of impressions you are serving, analyze the demographic data surrounding it and control which networks and rep agencies get impressions. The better ad servers let you target your campaigns by a number of psychogaphic and demographic criteria. There are a few good free ad serving solutions available (OpenAds for instance), however, if serving ads will be a serious part of your business (and you have the minimum required pageviews) you should look into purchasing DART or Atlus.

Rep Agency

Examples: Technorati Media, Federated Media, and Gorilla Nation

We often use the words ad network when we mean to say rep agency, there is a significant difference.

A rep agency is a company that acts as a broker between publishers and agencies. In exchange for getting deals with major brand advertisers (Netflix, Fritos, Pepsi etc . . .) they take a portion of the revenue (anywhere between 30-60%). Rep agencies can be extraordinarily beneficial because they have well connected sales teams who can land deals that many small companies cannot. The good ones have an inside track with the major ad agencies, and they control a substantial volume of impressions — which makes it easier for them to get agencies to the table. Most large web properties, even those capable of doing direct sales will sell a portion of their inventory through rep agencies. It simplifies sales cycles and ensures that everyone “gets an ad.” Since every impression served from a rep agency represents a “sale,” these networks typically have a harder time filling inventory than ad networks.

The advertising chain

Setting up a set of campaigns for a large site means understanding the advertising chain. No one provider will be able to fill all of your available advertising inventory with the highest paying ads. How do you solve this? You chain a bunch of different providers together. Applications like the Rubicon Project and Pubmatic exist to make this easier, but you can do it on your own with a little bit of work.

Direct sales

This represents the most expensive ads in your stable. These are ads sold by your sales team. Typically the rate in which these ads are displayed are determined by contract you have with the advertiser. In most cases these will exist near the top of your chain and will take up anywhere from 30 to 60% of your inventory.

Rep Agency sales

Next down the line come your high quality rep agencies. The rule of thumb is to pick the one with the highest CPM and fill rate to exist at the top, and plug in other networks as passbacks. A passback is an additional provider that will be given an opportunity to serve an ad should the provider further up the chain be unable to. At this point you should have taken care of 20 or 30% more of your inventory, enough to finish the chain using . . .

Ad Networks

If you still have unsold inventory, don’t be afraid to throw in an ad network like Adsense. Under the right conditions, these networks can generate a substantial amount of revenue and just as importantly, they rarely ever have a problem with fill. Don’t give up on trying to fill your inventory using providers further up the chain though, typically ad networks provide lower quality, more generic ads than either direct sales or rep agencies.

Here is an example of an advertising chain:

Ad server: DART

Toshiba (Direct Sale)
Netflicks (Direct Sale)
Technorati Media (Rep Agency)

  • Tribal Fusion (Passback)
  • Blue Lithium (Passback)

Adsense (Ad Network)

Making money from ads on the web is a balancing act. Always, you are trying to maintain the highe,st possible CPM while still filling out your inventory. To do this requires experimentation and a little bit of patience. Never be afraid to keep trying, the more work you are willing to put into it, the more money you are likely to get out of it.

(emailer)

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...