Steve jobs book

Great book. I am listening to audio version of the book.

Lot of things to learn from Steve Jobs. He is such a perfectionsit and likes simplicity. He know very well about connecting dots.

I didn’t realize howmuch work went in keynote presentations and product packaging. That was so key in Steve’s success. You can have a great product but without early majority, it will fail…

Must read for all levels of management, business people and techies..

Building a business by giving away free services

One way to look at a business is what it offers to the world. Any Business offers product or service for a specific price. Most of the money is made by industry leaders in that segment. The problem with product based business is that the business has to sell every time. Service based business on the other hand requires less frequent selling or even no selling but just order taking. Some call it Freeconomics.

Lets compare both business models with examples:

Product based business:

Microsoft selling windows software is a very good example of Product based business. Revenue from each installation of windows software for Microsoft is about $30. Regular user is involved with an average of two windows licences of the software (one for home and other at work). That transalates a $60 revenue for microsoft per user. Microsoft releases new windows version every 4 years.

One way to summarize it as $15/year business for Microsoft. Not bad considering 20% of worlds populaton use computers everyday. Thats More than one billion people.

Service based business :

Google search is a great example of service based business. About 70% of their site space is devoted to search while displaying ads on the rest 30%. This model is free for customers while it costs a business to advertise. As we search everyday on the web, Google attracts more and more advertisers. These advertisements are smartly priced making it more attractive for Google. A Law-firm might pay $10 for a targeted visitor to their site while it costs less than ten cents for a corner store restaurant owner to bring a targeted customer for their site.

On Average google makes 20 cents for every search. A typical user searches 5 times a day. thats $1 per day or $365per year revenue for Google. This is 25 times more than what we saw in the microsoft revenue per user in the above example.

While doing this business, Google builds a use behaviour database which is very valuble asset Google ends up with.

SEO tips and SEO best practices

Are you planning to create a website for your business or personal branding? Good SEO practices will help you in organic traffic from search engines. Organic traffic is the best traffic in terms of conversions and it is free.

Here are few good SEO practices:

Domain name for great organic results: If you haven’t got a domain name yet, Choose a proper domain name related to the purpose of website. Brand name, most used keyword related to business, easy and simple to remember keyword related to your business marks the list of good choices. One or two hyphens are fine. Register for two years or more., seach engines will consider you as “not fly by business” and give more credibility.
URL structure for better SEO: Make sure URLs of each page are properly structured within the categories. If you are using a CMS or Blog, Make sure proper perma link structure is setup. This is key to rank higher in the search engines. Make sure URL is relevant to content of the page.
Sitemap with a list of all pages: This practice will make help search robots to index all the pages.
Easy Navigation for Better SEO: Make sure you have navigation bar included in the site which will help to access all the pages of your site.
Title makes big difference : Choose a catchy title. Title makes big difference. Magzine is sold based on what is on cover. Same thing applies to website traffic. Title is very important.
Add Google search box on your website: Most of the visitors go back to google after they finish browsing your site. Adding Searchbox helps helps users to use that search box and go on to next site. This will also help your site better indexed in google search engine.
ALT + Picture : Make sure ALT tags and descriptions tags are used in the pictures. This might get you more traffic as there may be very few pictures with that keyword search result.
HTML Errors: make sure your site is free of HTML errors. This will help spiders to index your site properly.
Authority Links: Try to get links from authority sites related to your business. If your site is related to Software, It would be great to get link from top Software providers related to your business.
Keywords Keywords: Use Keywords properly in Meta keywords tags. Don’t just leave with one or tow and at the same time don’t use excessively.
Different Pages Different titles and keywords : Make sure different pages contain different titles and different keywords. Using same keywords, titles and description will make the site spammy.
Better user experience : Don’t annoy users with popups, sounds and all those shady things. Time spent by each visitor will increase search engine rankings over time.
Faster page loads: Avoid unnecessary files on the page. If it takes too much time to load, people will search for something else.
Superior content. This is ultimate. you can have all the above wrong but great content, your site will rank better and bring you more traffic. On the other hand, you can have all the above correct but no content means no so good Search Engine exposure in the long run.
Link love: Make sure to get links from good site, avoid links from bad sites and add links to good sites on your pages.

Hope this helps you. Good luck. If you like this post, add it to your favourite bookmarking site.