At MoveYourWeb we pay a lot of attention to the communication process. A number of customers switched to us after using offshore development resources due to the communication problems they experienced in those relationships.

One of the important aspects of effective communication is stable and reliable internet connection (currently we have 8mb down and 1mb up stream). The sad fact is that even the biggest internet provider in the country has some downtime happening. So the last week we signed agreement with another alternative providing another back-end up and down links to our office. The administrators already performed the necessary updates of the routing server to handle the change of one ISP to another during the downtime. Stay tuned!

While reading some stuff on outsourcing, I came across a peculiar new title of a Chief Globalization Officer. This position was new to me, and I thought that it might be new to somebody else, too. So, I got down to my next article for the blog, which, as I decided, would be dedicated to this new C position.

The necessity of creating this new position was conditioned by the fact that many companies that work on an international level are very often puzzled when it comes to the real issues of targeted or online marketing with a local flavor. In fact, “website globalization puts this issue front and center as firms market their brand and wares through their corporate URLs”. Companies often lack a high profile specialist to control the messaging, budget, technology infrastructure, and other key elements for the channel of global communication and commerce.

It happens that this is exactly a CGO who should take upon all these duties. The CGO is often compared to that second steady hand: the catalyst for global thinking, and responsiveness.

The CGO’s main functions include:

1) to form a corporate global mindset to help the organization enter new markets, and maintain competitiveness in those markets for many years to come;

2) to pursue the best global leadership talent to be able to respond to local conditions;

3) to continuously improve organizational structures to meet local conditions;

4) to conduct the management of knowledge and information, and utilize it through the best use of technology.

The first company to appoint a Chief Globalization Officer outside the US is American Cisco Systems, Inc. With that, one more C level position has been created in corporate America. Wim Elfink, the first professional Cisco’s Chief Globalization Officer will go to Bangalore and work from there, thus creating the first CGO job in Corporate America outside its borders; i.e offshore.

According to Mr Elfink, as a Chief Globalization Officer, he will be in charge of “executing the growth strategy for the company globally, including collaborating with Cisco’s worldwide functional leaders to innovatively globalize and scale all functions by leveraging their work in India as a platform”.

Besides, he will take up elaborating disruptive business models for Cisco to create new markets, go-to-market channels, and technologies. Additionally, he is planning to carry out an analysis of possible implementation of Cisco’s $1.1billion investment in India. He emphasizes that developing and strengthening existing partnerships with Indian IT partners on a global scale is of vital importance to Cisco. The reason is not only that India’s market is growing for Cisco products and services. In fact, India was chosen due to many other factors. First, India is an open culture, unlike, say, China. It is well known for its strong sense of partnership, which is beneficial for implementing Cisco’s globalization strategy. Secondly, it has educated workforce, innovative customers, and skilled partners that have global capabilities. Finally, India’s government pays much attention to economic development across all levels of society.

Overall, time will show if the position of a Chief Globalization Officer justifies itself. However, already now it is clear that with the development of the modern global economy, and growing availability of the offshoring services, this new C position can become irreplaceable for implementing modern globalization strategy.

At recent IT English classes that are organized in our company (personally I attend upper-intermediary level as a lot of other management do, we also have intermediary level classes) we discussed the evolution of advertisement on the internet. Everybody could remember the crappy ad banners that were flooding the web sites 4-6 years ago. Those were simply untargeted and spent a big deal of advertising budgets of .com companies. Nowadays the advertisement is getting more context and relevant with ad programs starting from AddWords and Overture and finishing with Amazon  having ‘customers  who  bought that  book also  bought‘ feature, which provides the results based on the sales history. The advertising and marketing are getting less offensive and are getting more and more focused on target audience.

The world of marketing is definitely getting smarter with the marketing masseges hitting very small targets. The successful marketers of the future and successful business ventures are those who will be able prepare X versions of the same basic ad delivered to X different users based on both data that is mined behind the scenes, and data that they directly input.

Web 2.0 is in power now and the most valuable companies are those focused of competitive differentiation based on data. Those services succeded because they effectivelly gather and use the data - there is no much sense listing all of YouTubes, MySpace, Facebook and others here. They are known not for the security, reliability or security. In fact many have experience outage that would have killed any other traditional web company. Data is the most important component of internet success nowadays. Think about the way you utilize and use the data while starting your next business venture or rethinking the functionality of the current solution.

 p.s. I’m a big fan of our English classes not just because we polish our English speaking skills here but because this is a great opportunity to discuss ideas, trends and innovations happening in the IT industry.

Everything started from outsourcing. Companies began to shift some part of their workload (everything but core business activities, like human resources, catering and security) to outside companies within national boundaries. Some time later businesses realized that because of great imbalance in global economy, they could cut down their costs by sending their outsourced work abroad, i.e. to a row of developing countries where the cost of labor is much cheaper than in post-industrial countries. That is how the idea of offshoring was born. First, low-skilled service jobs like telephone call centres, component assembly were shifted abroad; then businesses began to handle more complicated intellectual tasks over to other countries.

The arrival of the digital age has contributed to another notion in a business sphere - Offshoring 2.0. Since, digital communications have become more affordable, many partner offshoring companies have become able to do much more for their clients than before. “In the very near future, for small and medium size businesses, having partners in the Pacific Basin will no longer seem exotic, but the norm”, Research Director of the Economic Research Council Dan Lewis says.

If later, outsourcing companies were involved in all kinds of outsourcing, and used to take up any task that was offered to them, now they have become selective, or better say, they have become more specialized. So what differs Offshoring 2.0 from offshoring is narrow specialization. Today there is a number of offshoring companies, which handle only one particular type of tasks, i.e. bookkeeping, software development, web development, engineering, financial analysis etc. It has been estimated that up to 40 percent of currently outsourced jobs, could be next in a row to be sent offshore. Such professional classes as lawyers, accountants, medical practitioners, computer programmers and even financial analysts – can soon lose their jobs for the reason that their work will be outsourced to outside countries! There is something to think about…

Offshoring 2.0 is typical not only for the countries of the Pacific basin, as mentioned by Dan Lewis, but also for CEE (Central and Eastern Europe). Many of the firms in Belarus, Ukraine, and Bulgaria started creating companies that even though smaller than the end-to-end offshore companies, but are becoming quite large as specialized companies. Let’s take Moveyourweb Web Development IT Outsourcing Company as a vivid example of a modern, rapidly growing and professional Offshoring 2.0 company. We deal with only one IT branch, which is web development, including a variety of related services:

- web design;

- web development;

- search engine optimization;

- logo design and corporate identity design;

- Offshore Dedicated Center.

But no more than that. Being focused on only one branch of Information Technologies, the company gets a splendid opportunity to master certain IT skills and, thus, perform their job on a highly professional level. Rather than taking up everything without having profound knowledge and enough experience, having narrow specialization, we believe, is more advantageous to us and our clients.

Offshoring 2.0 is just starting to open up huge opportunities. This method of optimization of many foreign business processes keeps gaining popularity, and promises to become the greatest business paradigm of the XXI century.

Having worked in SEO department for some time, I found out lots of interesting and extremely useful things about traditional SEO. However, I thought I could enrich my knowledge, and started looking for some other effective ways of getting traffic to sites, which together with traditional methods could contribute to my site’s promotion. What I discovered is a peculiar branch of Internet marketing, which is Social Marketing.

The idea of Social Marketing is in using a variety of Internet resources (weblogs, social networking sites and communities, social bookmarking sites) in order to increase popularity of your sites.

Many of us have heard of blogs. In fact, blogs can be found anywhere on the Web now. However, few people know exactly what a blog is and what it is used for, except for expressing thoughts… My personal vision of a blog is that this is a personal journal on the Web, and its main difference from the site is that it is updated frequently, displaying its content in chronological dated entries. Most blogs allow readers to post comments to posts, and link from their blog to your posts. Besides, readers can subscribe to your blog (with the help of an RSS feed), and automatically receive updates.

There are 5 most popular types of blogs: Wordpress, Blogger,Movable Type, TypePad and My Space. To create a blog you just need to sign up for a free account, set up the blog, customize it to improve your blog’s usability, and start posting. When setting up, make sure that you incorporate an XML feed which allows you to say that you can share an RSS feed with others. Besides, using an RSS feed will enable you to ping the blog each time you update your content. Pinging is another process unfamiliar to many. By pinging, you alert the various services that there is some new content on the blog, which needs to be crawled and indexed. If the content on the blog is updated regularly, the popularity of the blog is rising. If you want to profit from your blog, keep it alive!

I think that My Space is of special significance for internet marketers. It can be called a huge Internet community with millions of registered users. This is your unique Internet space, where you can write about yourself, promote your products, brands, or sites in your own blog, make thousands of friends, with whom you can share your product’s or site’s info, post bulletins announcing your product, or site, and thus increase your site’s traffic. Making My Space friends has become easier with availability of a number of friends’ adding tools (i.e. Adder Robot), which allow you to automatically send out more than a hundred friend requests a day! What’s more, My Space is crawled by Google all the time, meaning that your sites will be indexed faster.

Another step is to start your own interest group within My Space. If you do that, you can bring together a group of people interested in the same thing (i.e. in the topic of your website), recruit affiliates, network and promote you site. If your group counts over 20,000 members, you can easily create your social network and promote your site within the network.

Digging blogs, their life and functioning, I eventually had to deal with Technorati. In fact, creating a blog and simply posting it will lead to nothing unless you let other people know about it. For this purpose, you can use Technorati, which is one of the best traffic providers for bloggers. Its main function is to make your blog easier to find when people search by technorati tags. Tag is a very important term in Internet Marketing. Simply put, this is a category, under which you publish your site on a social bookmarking site. As a rule, this is a keyword, or better say, a set of keywords, preferably 8-15. Your site will be stored in the site’s database under the categories you will point as tags, and people are most likely to find your site by tags.

Besides, Technorati is often called a large blog ranking engine. Your blog is ranked depending on the number of links to your blog from various websites. It is similar to a Page Rank for the site: the higher your blog ranks the easier your blog is to find among others. To create your own account, and find out more about Technorati, go to http://www.technorati.com.

Now, let’s shift away from Technorati, and talk about the largest social bookmarking service which I found quite useful - del.icio.us. By creating your account, and submitting your site to del.icio.us with correspondent one-word (!) tags, you allow millions of other users view your favorite sites, bookmark them, and comment on them. This service offers users a unique opportunity not only to store their links online, but also to share them with others.

By the way, you can submit your sites manually from the social bookmarking site, or if you have a blog, namely, WordPress, you can install an Auto Social Poster plugin, which would auto submit your post’s link to del.icio.us, furl, simpy, spurl, blinklist and several other bookmarking sites each time a new post appears on the blog. In your blog’s admin area (Plugin’s options) you can point the tags you want your post to be published for. Besides, the plugin automatically converts your tags to Technorati links.

Of course, Social Marketing is not limitted only to what I have just described. I will get back to this topic in my future posts, trying to focus on more specific things rather than talking in general.

It is not a secret to anyone today what copywriting is. Before, World Wide Web had been developed on a larger scale and had been brought to almost every home, copywriting was inseparable from advertising being part of any effective advertising campaign. However, with time, marketing experts started talking about copywriting for the web, and later, about seo copywriting. What is the difference between the latter two?

The difference is in the “ultimate reader” of the content. The copy can be written for people to read, get useful information, and eventually get motivated to do something, for example, to purchase some thing or service (web copywriting); and for the search engines’ spiders to crawl the site and evaluate several distinct elements of a web page (i.e. keywords, meta-tags etc), and then rank the web page based on the analysis of the produced results (seo copywriting).

A copywriter who wants to write a SE-friendly copy should stick to certain rules, though informal, but rather useful for producing an effective piece of content to help his/her colleagues seo managers get better and faster results in SEO:

1) Keeping the main points at the top of the article.

2) Using keywords in the content (the keywords’ density compiles 7% of all the content).
Practically, keywords may be found in two places on a web page; either in alt- and meta tags (title and description are extremely important) or in the body of the content. Good SEO copywriting is by no means simply stuffing the content with the keywords. This is a creative process, which requires much patience, good knowledge, and feeling of the language. Over-using your keywords may bring a number of negative consequences to the site you are writing for. First, your human readers will feel that the content is too formal and boring and will not read your copy carefully. Secondly, search engines may ban your site as SPAM, and you will have to take time rewriting your content as well as restoring your rankings.

3) Remembering your target audience.
It is crucial to consider the target audience of the site for the structure of the webpage content. Say, if the page is informational, it has to be correctly organized and easy to read. For example, having headlines and headers is a must. On the contrary, if the page aims at selling or promoting something, try to use call to action statements to provoke the customers’ motivation.

4) Staying away from Corporate Style Language.
One of the main slogans of writing for the web is “the shorter – the better”. Avoid writing long and complex sentences. Excessive use of neologisms, phraseological units, jargon, abbreviated word combinations, as well as metaphors, hyperboles and other stylistic devices is unacceptable for seo copywriting, and will decrease your chances for fast SE indexing and ranking.

Overall, an effective search engine-friendly copy reflects a balance between keyword density and positioning, number of words, relevant, interesting text, and the uniqueness of the content. Be careful and attentive when writing for seo purposes. Determine the number of words your content will consist of. Then, estimate how many keywords (7%) you are going to use, and where you will position them not to sound obtrusive. If the information you have on the topic is not enough, start scanning various Internet resources for additional information. Remember that there is no way for a “copy and paste” method when writing for seo. If you use somebody else’s information, paraphrase it! When you are done with the creative process of writing and paraphrasing, devote some time to technical things, i.e. have a look at the way the information is organized; add headlines and headers, highlight some keywords, structure the information. Finally, proofread your copy to avoid misprints, spelling and grammar mistakes, count the number of primary and supplementary keywords you used in your copy, see if it reads fine and interesting. If in your content you refer to some other site, check that the link you have placed works fine, and that the site, you are referring to, is not abandoned, or banned.

Following the above mentioned tips will help you write a bunch of search engine- and human-friendly copies of the highest quality.

Outsourcing seems to have recently become a buzz term in the business sphere. Actually, it is not only the word, which has become so popular, but also the process itself. The reality is that many respected businesses aim at outsourcing their business processes. The number of businesses in various industries shifting their work to outside parties is astonishing! If so, outsourcing process must bring quite huge financial benefits to the people introducing it into their businesses.

The very essence of outsourcing is in the wish of many companies to get rid of a significant part of their workload shifting it to third parties. This idea proved to become not that bad, and, therefore, more and more companies bring themselves to trusting outside companies with some part of their work. Furthermore, with the development of the Internet and growing availability of many online services, the work is handled over to outside countries, sometimes, even quite distant: Belarus, India, Pakistan etc. Why is it happening?

The truth is that many developed countries experience lack of qualified and talented professionals, people who are willing to do their job with enthusiasm and proper care. Besides, an employer must pay quite good money to qualified work force in developed countries, which is not always profitable for a company. Here outsourcing to developing countries might become a perfect solution. Imagine, if all work is outsourced to the countries that have immense qualified labour force able to complete your projects perfectly and at lower rates. For instance, if you usually pay a professional in your country about a hundred dollars for doing some qualified job, you will have to pay about twenty dollars to professionals who will do the same job for you through a third party.

Besides, offshore outsourcing industry offers another nice opportunity of organizing your business process in Offshore IT Outsourcing market - Offshore Dedicated Center. The major financial benefit of ODC establishment is that it will save you up to 70% of IT spending by reducing employment costs, contract and project execution. Therefore, if your company is focused on IT, maybe, you should establish an ODC to make your working process more effective, and cheap! It’s your virtual IT department that works produce the product of same or even improved quality but at 1/4 of the cost.

Of course, the fact that so many businesses undertake outsourcing does not mean that you also need it. Before taking up this important decision, you should evaluate if you will really benefit from outsourcing. To do that you will most likely need to consider a number of various factors of your business. First, think carefully if you are comfortable with handling major part of your work over to third parties. The problem is that together with your work requirements and specifications, you will be handing over all the financial details of your business, and so you must establish full trust with the third party firm that is going to perform the work for you.

Secondly, any outsourcing company you choose for working on your projects must have the best security features to protect your personal information and data. Here, references are extremely important. You will need to find out if other firms and companies have previously cooperated with that outsourcing company and if they are satisfied with the results of the outsourcing process. If you get positive feedback on the work of that company, and if you are satisfied with other queries that you have made, go ahead and start outsourcing!

Besides, it is very positive when an outsourcing company let you check the quality of the work performed by its employees before you sign your contract. You can give an outsourcing company a kind of a test (some piece of work) to find out if the quality of their work is good enough for you. If you are not satisfied with the work done by them, you can always say ‘no’, and go search for some other company that will better meet your working standards.

Overall, from the financial point of view, outsourcing is a profitable process to undertake in your business. It helps cut down costs keeping the quality of the work done on the same level as before, and sometimes, even higher. However, think twice before choosing the outsourcing company to work for you. Scan through their official website, examine their portfolio, make the necessary inquiries about the company and only then get in contact with the company’s sales rep.

All the sources enumerated below are not a kind of advertisement for them; this list was compiled in order to help our copywriters and everyone who wants to publish his/her original ideas on any topic. I ask my colleagues to expand this list if the information above is not complete.

1.) http://www.ezinearticles.com

The leader in collecting articles and ezines from anyone in the Internet. The biggest articles-share system that has a number of opportunities for professional copywriters and for the beginners and SEO-specialists as well. You can try your skills in copywriting by becoming a member of this community and you have 10 articles submissions for free but that is not all! If your articles appear to be an outstanding source for the people – you have a chance to win a Platinum status that allows you to publish an unlimited number of articles. You are allowed to use external links from your article to other resources and even the site you want to promote. The use of special html-tags is restricted. After you publish an article, the site-editor has to check it whether it complies with the rules. Usually it takes 3 or 4 days. Recently approved articles are seen on the index page with a PR of 6 but do not delude yourself as your article won’t be there for a long time, though the categories where your articles will appear also have a high PR. You can then always upgrade your membership by paying a fixed price. The interesting feature is that you can always be aware of the visitors activity and their transfer to your web-site from all of your articles.

2.) http://www.articlehub.net

An interesting resource that allows publishers submit their articles for free that will appear in a special related category. Moreover, there are 5 last submitted articles + 5 most viewed articles on the index page that has a PR of 4. One link from an article is permissible. Worth considering if the article is a unique source of information. Then you can purchase permanent links under the articles. The example can be viewed here: http://www.articlehub.net/article9890.html

The last issue is not very interesting as you are to pay 50$ for this step and at the same time your links won’t be probably counted as there can be unlimited number of the links and you won’t get any PR after the update.

3.) http://www.prweb.com/

The most “serious” resource on the Web that is targeted mostly at press-releases rather than articles and ezines. The main page has PR7 and if you apply for a paid membership most likely your press-release will appear on the fist page and will stay there for a long time – pretty enough to get indexed for the web search engines crawlers. Easy and intuitively clear registration. RSS feeds are supported and ease the life of the clients in searching of a particular press-release. This is what this service gives you:

“We will show you how to get the most out of what has become the most advanced and robust system for distributing news releases to reporters, search engines and thousands of web sites that download news via our daily XML/RSS feeds.”

There is also such option as PRWeb Direct™:

WHY USE PRWEB DIRECT™?

• Same Day Distribution
• Streamlined Submission Process
• Personalized Service
• Advanced Distribution Options
• Increased Search Engine Visibility
• PRNewswire Distribution Options
• Press Release Writing and Editing Service

This is not a complete number of services provided to you by this extremely popular company!

4.) http://www.submityourarticle.com

An interesting source that allows you to submit your articles to thousands of publishers and web sites with just one click! Your articles will be definitely and instantly published on multiple major web sites that increase your link popularity. Personal RSS feed for your articles - add to your own site to keep your site automatically updated. The service will help you to boost traffic to your web-site that results in increasing sales. You can even make money from copywriting here: you are to sign up for a free course that will show you how to write articles better and more concise. A huge number of topics to choose from.

5.) http://www.articlegeek.com/

Another reputable source to submit your articles and ezines. There is a huge number of benefits that you can acquire from them:

“We, the editors, will be aggressively marketing and building the ArticleGeek.com brand. We will optimize all of our pages and build links to our website as much as possible. For you, this means that you will get increased exposure and the increased chance of getting picked up by more websites or publications. This, in turn, will lead to the all important one way links and traffic to your website.”

They just require a one simple link to their resource to keep it alive – that is their only requirement and a way of donation. Yes, it is fair just one link from you and 10 links from them from 10 of your articles. Only useful and unique content is allowed.

Just creating a web-commerce site for a store is not enough to start a successful business and get subsequent revenue. To manage this site is one of very important steps if the owner wants to beat the market. There is a huge number of businesses that run off the track only because of the management system negligence.

If you want your web-site become popular and your business prosper – do not abandon the management of the web-site. You are to follow all the trends in the sphere of hi-tech and implement them on your web-site even if doesn’t relate to technology and web-development. The efficient issue is to draw potential visitors to your web-site and in order to achieve this one should not neglect such marvelous marketing steps like creating a blog, for example, a successful corporative blog that presents its visitors with detailed information about modern furniture trends on the market; making some press-releases about the new products and services provided by a concrete web-site; organizing meetings and broadcasting them online again with definite details about a web-site; leading Google AdWords campaign and come out first in the Sponsored Search results; taking part in affiliate programs and so on and so forth.

One should not forget the that a Sale is an issue of enormous importance. Nevermind how great a sale is (-10%, -30% or more) this produces a psychological effect of the end customers. The table “Currently on sale” affects the customers as a magical artifact. Special events and occasions are the best sources of marketing strategy. Let’s say “Christmas Sale”, “Independence Day Sale”, “Thanksgiving Day Sale” and other. Well, this is a great marketing step in order to attract visitors reminding them of the pleasant things that they want to hear at the same time showing that shop owners as well as shop-assistants are caring about the end customers and show their “equal relation” or “we-group” (psych.) in relation to the buyers. Decoration here places by no means the last role. An ideal instance can be this online-shop: Ductless air conditioners & heat pumps store.

Summarizing this post one should restate the fact that there is always a huge scope of substantial improvement that a webmaster can put into practice if the ultimate objective is to benefit on-line!