What Does Yoga Have To Do With Digital Marketing?

Yoga was invented thousands of years ago in forests and temples of India while Digital Marketing is a recent technology. How the hell could these two be related? I never thought so myself till that one day.

It was early morning 5′o clock and I had literally not slept the night before. Please bear with me while I give you a little background. I was working for a client project for developing their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Social Media strategy. They are a sports goods retailer and recently came up with an innovative range of shoes that they want to launch in the market. They were completely B2B till date and had no B2C presence before, starting it from the drawing board now. Their management had set aggressive targets for their online sales but put lot of restrictions to avoid conflicts with their B2B partner network. I had a tough time convincing them on multiple fronts and we were going back and forth for some time.

Our Yoga guru arrived in the hall and we started the warm up. I was half asleep, but did not want to miss my Yoga class. We did the ‘Surya Namaskar’ followed by the ‘Asnas’ of the day. I was dead tired and then came my favorite Asna – the ‘Shavasna’. If you know Yoga, you will be aware that ‘Shavasna’, literally means the Corpse Pose, where you lie on the back with closed eyes and deep breath. The body is completely released and mind fully relaxed. It was during the ‘Shavasna’ that I suddenly started getting a great feeling as if everything was un-tangling from within, as if I was getting answers to all my questions. I am not a saint but that was my moment of ‘nirvana’. It is difficult to describe all of it in words, but I am trying to summarize some of the key points that came to my mind that time:

1. Focus on the core: The only way you get the most out of Yoga is to forget everything else around you and just focus on one thing – your breath. This is the same with Digital Marketing. The only way to get the most out of a digital marketing initiative (whether it is SEO, SEM, SMO, SMM etc.) is to first forget about everything else and focus on the “Content”. While developing content you should not get distracted by any other activities or constraints. It is “Content” which is the heart and core of the entire initiative and needs to be relevant to the audience. The biggest mistake many of us tend to do is to make all strategies first and then start working on the content. In such scenarios, we later on figure out that the content is not in line with our strategy and we ask our team to modify the content rather than changing the strategy. This is the perfect recipe of failure and then we complain that nothing worked at all.

2. Long Term Vision: Yoga never promises quick, short term benefits. Someone wanting to build six pack abs within three months need not to come for a Yoga class. Yoga is always practiced with a vision to have long and healthy life, the way ancient ‘Yogis’ or saints in India lived for hundreds of years with strong physical and mental conditions. Digital marketing, off-late, had been used abusively by many technologists as a means to get quick results without bothering about the long term vision. Any update by Google and such people were running crazy to re-gain their rankings.

3. Inner Strength: Yoga is all about building inner strength – a balance between mind and body. Yoga does not focus much on external muscular built or beautification. Its aim is very simple – keep you fit and strong from within. It might not sound strange to my marketing friends (I am myself from marketing background) that building an external perception without building inner strength does not last long. I have seen organizations who did excellent in marketing but could not handle their cash flows and later yielded to disastrous results.

4. Continuity: You do Yoga for couple of months diligently to the extent that you can become a Yoga trainer yourself. Then due to some reasons you leave doing Yoga regularly. What happens? With time the benefits you got from doing Yoga subsides and after few months you are back in the same situation where you were before. This is the same with any digital marketing initiative be it SEO, SEM, SMO or SMM. E.g. you might have done very with search engine optimization and got yourself into the top of SERP (search engine results page). But if you leave the regular activities for SEO then you might lose that ranking very soon.

Abbreviations used:

SEO – Search Engine Optimization
SEM – Search Engine Marketing
PPC – Pay per Click
SERP – Search Engine Results Page
SMO – Social Media Optimization
SMM – Social Media Marketing
GA – Google Analytics

5 Fast Fat Loss Nutrition Switches

All of us, myself included, are not really good, at the deprivation style of nutrition and burning fat. I don’t really have to tell you what is bad for you and what you just shouldn’t eat because for the majority of people out there – you already know! The problem is in the way we try to deny ourselves those sweet and salty treats!

Whenever we simply stop doing something cold turkey and that includes eating or drinking a particular food our brain just sees it as something we can’t have. Not only does this flick a switch in 99.9% of men that fights this principle just out of spite, but it also makes us feel that we are missing out on something that we like or even love. This is a strong emotion and extremely hard to control.

With this in mind, the big buzzword that is getting a lot of attention when it comes to better nutrition is SWITCH! What this means is that instead of stopping something outright and just hoping to fight the cravings and emotions with outstanding willpower, you actually replace it for a better option! It is very much like quitting smoking and where many successful people use alternate methods to keep their hands busy while quitting. This behavior switching technique can often make a world of difference as opposed to going cold turkey.

Same goes for nutritional choices. Don’t try to quit something outright but actually substitute it with some better options. Try these five tips below to get you started on your way!

Fat Burning Nutrition Switch 1:

Leave desserts off the breakfast menu! Now I don’t mean that people are having ice cream and chocolate for breakfast although sadly, some people do! What I mean is that when we really look at the ingredients in some of our most popular breakfast cereals and other common options, you soon realize that they are better off in the dessert bar! Lose the sugary cereals, sweet muffins, fat filled bagels and croissants and look at options like a good omelet, high fiber/low sugar cereals, yogurt, smoothies and plenty of fresh fruit for starters.

Fat Burning Nutrition Switch 2:

Monitor your eating schedule. Personally, I see no value in the arguments that eating after 7 or 8pm causes you any grief whatsoever. Yep, I said it! It is not eating after this time that causes you to gain fat; it is the rubbish that we binge on after these times that causes the problem! With this in mind, you can stop late night binges by eating a larger lunch and then having dinner that little bit later.

Fat Burning Nutrition Switch 3:

Lose the processed food and go natural as often as you can! Processed and modified foods or carbohydrates are just plain bad and are often stripped of real nutritional value. Try your hardest to replace these foods with nuts, vegetable or fruits. Examples here are pretty straight forward; when eating red meat, hold the fries and add some extra “trees” or a salad. Instead of a calorie filled chocolate muffin or Danish on your morning coffee break why not grab a handful of nuts? And even though it is an old favorite, switch the eggs on toast to eggs flavored with parsley or spinach and then finish it with an apple!

Fat Burning Nutrition Switch 4:

You don’t want sugary drinks after a workout! This one is crazy! You go to all the effort of a hard workout, burning anywhere from 250 to 800 or even 1000 calories and then guzzle down a sugar filled energy drink, soda or juice and wipe out most or even all of your hard work in just a minute or two! You don’t need it and it’s a piece of marketing genius!

Fat Burning Nutrition Switch 5:

This one should go without saying, but do not just minimize the junk food in your house, but hide it! We are visual people and will suddenly get hungry when we see a nice yummy chocolate bar, packet of crisps or a stray dough-nut left around the house or fridge in full view.

So then, you want to remove as much junk food as you can from the whole house. But again, in both the light of not totally depriving yourself of sweetness and also keeping the rest of your household happy, feel free to keep some! However, keep them in a dark part of your pantry and make sure that you have plenty of bowls and containers of healthy, ready to eat foods like fruit and nuts. They not only taste great but are so good for you. Just get them in your eye line!

Here’s one last bonus switch for you! Employ your own nutrition expert – YOU! Stop listening in hope at all the latest craze diets and instead home-school yourself on the foods you eat for at least 2 weeks. Note down everything you consume for that period and really open up your eyes to all the foods and drinks that are out there. Stuff you have never even tried before is a perfect choice! Eat the recommended servings and keep a good eye on the calorie counts and see how you feel and what happens over the two weeks. You will come up with some great wins simply and effectively that will change your whole diet.

How E-commerce and M-commerce can Help Small Business Companies

Overview:

Small business companies still away from e-commerce and e-business. Many companies thinking e-commerce means only developing websites, offering customers support through Internet and expecting buyers traffic through various Internet Search engines and business to business (b2b) trade exchanges. Mobile commerce or m-commerce is still far away from these companies.

What is e-commerce?

Executing entire business process through electronically means using various online and offline softwares to serve products and services to the customers is popularly known as a e-commerce. Nowdays e-commerce turning into m-commerce means now companies can use mobile devices to run their entire business process to serve products and services to the customers.

Why small business companies behind to adopt e-commerce and m-commerce?

Small business companies using various different different software in various locations to run their business. But they dont have middleware softwares which can connect various softwares. Middleware sofftware is popularly known as a branch automation software or solution.

How middleware software work?

Middleware software simply upload syncronized Data (XML data) on companies own webserver. This XML data can be useful to make various web applications or company can download this data for another locations. This data can be use online perpose also as well as offline softwares also. To use XML data both the perpose companies need to make Data Syncronization tool which can convert XML to Database as well as Database to XML data format.

How Middleware can help m-commerce?

Companies can upload syncronized data on their own webserver and make xhtml web applications which can be accessed through mobile or PDA devices.

Path to success for Small business companies

1. Connect your all software through Middleware software.

2. Deveop Data Syncronization module which can help you to convert your database into XML format Database and again XML to your Database format.

3. Develop web based reports using XML Database into XHTML.

4. Access your reports through Internet web applications as well as mobile PDA devices.

5. You can download XML data from various locations and use into offline software through Data Syncronization.

6. You can do data entry throug offline softwares as well as web applications and through mobile devices also.