Take Control of Your Career: IT Trends & Predictions in 2017

IT Industry is ever evolving & you must keep yourself updated with new trends & technologies to plan your career ahead.

Cloud, mobile and big data have, together, changed the very fabric of conventional IT services and software development. Even as the global IT industry reinvents itself to come to terms with new digital realities, thousands of old IT and tech jobs around the world face imminent extinction, in turn, rest assured, birthing many new ones. 

For techies already in their coveted IT jobs and for those on the verge of starting their careers, 2017 has to be the year of reinventing their knowledge, skills and qualifications and bracing up for the new job-world, demarcated by the USD 4.0 trillion (yes, trillion) cloud computing and big data analytics market. 

How exciting does the tech-world get in year just around the corner, and how should you prepare for it?

Download this FREE CredForce factsheet, your must-have guide to the global IT industry in 2017 with trends and opportunities mapped out across sectors and technology spaces.

Thinking of Publishing an E book? Learn All You Need To Know About Ebooks & Create Marketing Plan On Your Own For Promoting Your Ebooks

E Books- A Small Intro

Electronic Book, E book or Digital book are the common nomenclatures as it is published in digital form.

Commercially sold online for dedicated e readers, however they can also be read in any other sophisticated devices such as computers & smart phones with controllable features.

Ecommerce websites have e-books in higher demand than the printed versions.

Scholars predict e- books to soon overtake the traditional publishing.

In USA 50% of the readers have dedicated e- reader devices.

Let Me Explain About Their Different & Most Popular Formats in Details

The most popular e-readers and their native supported formats are shown below:

Most Popular Ebook Format- EPUB:

 The EPUB format is the most widely supported vendor-independent XML-based (as opposed to PDF) e-book format; that is, it is supported by the largest number of e-Readers, including Amazon Kindle Fire (but not standard Kindle).

 It is also widely used on many software readers such as iBooks on iOS and Google   Books on Android. iBooks also support the proprietary iBook format, which is based on the EPUB format but depends upon code from the iBooks app to function.

 It is a free and open standard published by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF).

Benefits of EPUB:

The format we’re probably most familiar with is PDF (Portable Document Format) since that’s the file format used with Adobe Reader, which is installed on most computers. So it might seem that it would be the best bet, being that almost anyone with a computer can open a PDF file but it will create problems when viewed in smaller devices or smart phones.

Text in ePub books is not static. Instead, it flows, ePub eBooks display as much text as will fit on the screen, depending on the text size the user has chosen. So all the user has to do is read and flip pages.

MOBI Format:

As far as the differences between EPUB and MOBI are concerned, they are very different, technically-speaking, but not so different for the reader.

EPUB tends to format books in a way that looks closer to what the author initially sets up than MOBI does, especially with spacing. And MOBI files of same books tend to be quite a bit fatter, sometimes double in size. However, if we want to sell our book on Amazon, then it needs to be in MOBI format.

Fixed Layout:

The EPUB 3.0 Specification says that “content presentation should adapt to the user rather than the user having to adapt to a particular representation of content.”

But this principle doesn’t work for all types of documents. Sometimes content and design are so intertwined they cannot be separated. Any change in appearance risks changing the meaning, or losing all meaning. Fixed-layout documents give content creators greater control over presentation, when a reflowable EPUB is not suitable for the content.

Tools for Creating & Formatting E-Book

Formatting an ebook on your own can be challenging. Most authors seek an external third party to do the job. But here are a few tools which you could use to do the formatting yourself:

•  Scrivener: this writing software is not free, but it can export EPUB files

•  Calibre: free formatting and conversion software for ebooks

•  StreetLib: free web-based tool that can also handle distribution and sales if  we want

•  Jutoh: free software for creating e-books, paid version available with more functionality

•  Press Books: free formatting tool (up until a point), Wordpress- based

•  Apple Pages: (can export EPUB files)

•  Vellum: easy-to-use software for Mac users only to produce EPUB files

Publishing Your Ebook Online

There are a few important things you might want to consider before choosing one or more publishing partners. It is important that you know if your publishing partner is a retailer or a distributor, like Amazon & Apple ibookstore are the retailers where as smashwords & bookbaby are the aggregators which help you promote or sell your books on various platforms.

Online Retailers: 

I am listing the top 4 online ebook retailers in the world. E retailers will sell your ebooks exclusively on their platform and provide you a dashboard which would help you in managing your books, accounts, analytics reports etc.

The Amazon Kindle is a series of e-readers designed and marketed by Amazon.com. Amazon Kindle devices enable users to browse, buy, download and read e-books, newspapers, magazines and other digital media via wireless networking to the Kindle Store.

Total Number of e- books available- 4.3 million

The Barnes & Noble Nook (styled nook or NOOK) is a brand of e-readers developed by American book retailer Barnes & Noble, based on the Android platform.

Nook users may read nearly any Nook Store e-book for one hour once per day while connected to the store's Wi-Fi. This is to encourage them to visit B&N stores.

List Price -- Royalty Rate

 

USD                                         

$0.99 - $2.98 -- 40%

$2.99 - $9.99 -- 65%

$10.00 - $199.99 -- 40%

The iBooks Store is an EPUB content sales and delivery system that delivers e-books to any iOS device such as the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch).

It does not currently support either the downloading or reading of iBooks directly on Windows or Linux distributions, but it does support the downloading and reading of iBooks on OS X V10.9 and later.

E-book Market Share-  11%

Format Supported- EPUB majorly and PDF

Total no of books on ibookstore in 2014- 1.6 million recorded in2014.

Royalty- 70% of list price with no fees

To begin, authors must fill out a Paid Books Account application, which is reviewed in approximately two business days. Once authors receive a confirmation email, they must download a “delivery application” in order to deliver the book. Authors must have an Apple ID along with a valid credit card on file to sell books.

Kobo claims to offer one of the world’s largest e-bookstores, with nearly four million titles available across 68 languages and 190 countries. 

Kobo Writing Life offers a user-friendly, five-step process for uploading e-books, and the company will convert your manuscript into an e-pub file for free with no additional cost to the author.

Click to  download the PDF for royalty details & more.

A Few Online Distributors:

Smashwords is one of the largest distributors of indie ebooks and is absolutely free of cost platform i.e. you don't pay anything as long as you don't sell anything. 

They give a royalty rate of up to 85%.

Smashwords offers multiple author marketing tools, for use by the author, to promote their book to potential readers. 

These tools include author pages with bios and listings of published works, individual book pages for each work, support for embedded YouTube videos so the author can promote the book in their own words, member contributed reviews, author favoriting, and integration with social bookmarking and social networking sites. 

To learn go to smashwords marketing guide.

Bookbaby offers one of the the largest eBook distribution network, including Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and many other popular retailers in over 170 countries around the globe.

BookShop  a feature of BookBaby which offers a webpage and an ecommerce option so one can sell direct to the readers, delivering the book in three different formats.

Royalty- 85% of your retail sales price is paid to you. 

Dradts2difital is similar to  smashwords but small and have excellent customer service. They allow publishers to talk to their support executives to clear any doubts. 

The eBook Partnership eBook distribution service offers one of the most comprehensive worldwide eBook distribution networks available. They work with authors, publishers and many organizations from around the world.

All of their distribution partners accept standard (reflowable) file formats (mobi for Amazon and ePub for all others). Fixed Layout files are supported by Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Google, Barnes & Noble, Overdrive, eSentral and StoryTel. 

Annual cost- 35$

No royalty- Distribution Details- https://ebookpartnership.com/services/ebook-distribution/

Pronoun was known as vook and rebranded and re launched itself in 2015 with rich features and a more user friendly interface.

Pronoun sells to almost all the major retailers and let the authors keep 100% royalty. 

CreateSpace is Amazon’s online book publishing service. That alone is enough to make it a company worth looking into for an author who wants to self-publish. Like its parent company, CreateSpace has earned a reputation of providing a continually high standard of service. One can customize how they want to utilize the service, paying only for what one will use.

Standard distribution is free but charged for other services in case of hard copy is required.

Royalty Calculator- https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/#content6:royaltyCalculator

AuthorHouse is the leading provider of supported self-publishing services for authors around the globe, with over 70,000 titles released. Allows you to distribute your book to a worldwide audience in classic black & white, vibrant full-color, paperback, hardback, plus all digital formats.

Paperback List Price- 10% Royalty through retailers and 25%  in case directly sold through authorhouse book store

Ebook- 50% Royalty.

Features:

-Paid Marketing & Promotion- http://www.authorhouse.com/ServiceStore/ServiceList.aspx?Service=CAST-1582

-Bookselling services which involves providing incentives to book sellers and book stores- http://www.authorhouse.com/ServiceStore/ServiceList.aspx?Service=CAST-1582

There are several other aggregators and the list is long. Refer this link to know more:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/pw-select/article/61059-pw-select-february-2014-which-e-book-publisher-is-right-for-you.html

Self Promotion Strategy

Aggregators will play their role but you must make sure that you are doing your part if you don't want to shed too much of money on marketing via third party sites.

- Create a landing page or a website for your ebooks portfolio. Even if you have one book start with a small blog or a wordpress site. Do the SEO for your website. Learn the on page SEO techniques here.

- Use the strength of social media to spread the word of your book launch and create anticipation for the people. Tweet, Post & Engage with people on the social media. Find out  where do your target audience spend most of the time on social media and target them directly.

- Learn to create a Youtube channel for the promotions of your books and make sure you explain in details what your book is all about and share it on GFacebook, twitter, LinkedIn and social media platforms you are using.

- Email Marketing: If you have a list of email IDs of your potential readers or readers who have already purchased your books then capitalize on that. There are several email marketing service providers available out there which you could use to create your own campaigns, share, optimize and measure. You can also use email marketing to sell your books directly.

There are a few service providers which have a free trial version like Mailchimp which is my personal favorite provides 2000 mails for free. Use beefree.io to create awesome responsive campaigns for your ebooks.

- Blog and provide an excerpt of your ebook to your targeted audience for free of cost after asking them to sign up. You can create sign up forms using instapage or unbounce for free of cost as part of their trial period program. You can later use these mail IDs for email marketing and remind them to purchase the book and take their reviews.

With the use of proper marketing mix and content strategy you should be able to achieve some soild leads. Make sure you start promoting your book even if you haven't yet completed it or have almost completed the book, this will create anticipation among your target audience and work in parallel with all your marketing strategies along with writing your book.

If you think it's a bit hectic to do marketing and write your book at the same time then you could always outsource. 

Mail me at my mail ID or connect with me on LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/yiftekhar to know more.

Google Data Studio – Features & Benefits

Create Beautiful Data Stories with Google Data Studio 360

The application is still under test and improvements are being made to the beta version of the platform. Currently it is available only in the United States.

It allows you to turn your boring data into beautiful and informative reports that are easy to read and understand at a moment’s glance. Currently it lets you create five reports along with unlimited editing and sharing.

Joao Correia ( Director- Data Insights at Blast Analytics & Marketing) says that “Google Data Studio marks the birth of a new era of how organizations consume, share and use analytics data to drive insights and create even greater business value.”

Google Data Studio can extract data from AdWords, Google Analytics, YouTube, BigQuery, Attribution 360 and Google Sheets to provide at a single platform.

It works like other Google Documents as you can share the reports with anyone in your contacts list and enable them to either view or edit the data. Thus it also reduces the monitoring load for the company’s senior managers who have to mail their juniors every time they want to check the report, but with Google Data Studio it’s real time editing and reporting.The work load and the efficiency of the organization is supposed to increase with the advent of Google Data Studio.

Let’s Have a Look at This Report Created Using Google Data Studio

It seems so organized, neat and not complex. The idea that we get after seeing this report is that how wonderfully we could create reports of our own and for our own organization.

Google Data Studio For Large Enterprises

Dedicated Google support and training. Support from their account team is built into the Google analytics 360 Suite. It will all be covered in your service level agreement.

On boarding

They will start with a thorough needs analysis for your business. Then they will help you get up to speed, with full support and training materials.

Ongoing training & exclusive access.

They will train your business analysts, marketing and technical staff. They’ll get priority access to new education and training, plus exclusive invitations to beta feature tests.

Secure data.

Their global infrastructure is advanced, secured, and trustworthy, so your solutions will be both powerful and protected.

Plug into Google’s entire stack.

The Google Analytics 360 Suite integrates with other Google solutions like AdWords, the Google Display Network and Google BigQuery. One can pair it with DoubleClick Bid Manager to reach you’re their best customers at the right moments with auto-optimized bidding. You could use your website data to segment high-value customers and remarket to them automatically. This is truly personal and real-time advertising — at scale.

This is how your Dashboard is going to look like (Still in the beta phase)

Guide to SEO: 10 Tips to improve the ranking of your webpage

Ranking on Google and other search engines accounts for the traffic generated online to a particular website. There are many factors which affect the ranking of a page on a search engine.

A search engine indexes your website based on the quality of your website, usefulness, title & keyword s coherence with the content, design etc.

But first you need to realize that in order to index your website on the first page of the google you need to improve the overall quality and user experience on your website.

Let’s have a look at a few tips which has helped me achieve some great results for my clients and could help you to achieve the same for yourself.

1.       Title of the page: Make sure that you have a title for your web page which should be relevant to the purpose of the page, service or your business. A title shouldn’t exceed more than 59 characters and create interest for the user in the first impression.

2.       Meta Description:  The meta description defines the overall business or services offered in not more than 160 characters specifically for the landing page. If you go beyond 160 characters then your description would be clipped and replaced with dots after the limited number of characters which might sound meaningless and nobody would click on your link even if your indexing is higher.

3.       Sitemap: Defining the sitemaps on a website is very important. They help the google bots to analyze your website and adds relevancy to the search engine optimization of your page. More importantly, it is the list of all the available pages on your website that search engines should crawl.

4.       Meta Attributes: The meta robots tag states when search engines should explore, index or follow your page. This tag can be responsible for the absence of your website in search engines index.

The "noindex" value prevents the page from being indexed and the "notfollow" value prevents the links from being tracking by search engines robots.

The tag should be placed after the <title> tag and the meta Description in the <head> tag of your HTML document.

5.       Link Canonical: A canonical link element is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the "canonical", or "preferred", version of a web page as part of search engine optimization.

The attribute link rel="canonical" enables you to avoid duplicate content. A canonical URL corresponds to the favorite version of a set of pages with a similar content (example: a product sheet found in two different categories and thus in two different links).

Determine the URL you would like to present to users and indicate it in your tag.

This tag is located after the <title>tag in the <head> of you HTML document. To use properly the canonical URL, read this Google article: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en.

6.       Use ALT Attributes: The alt attribute gives information to search engines about the description of your image (An alternative text).

The alt attribute must be defined, so that robots get information about the description of the image in order to index it in image search engines.

It can be helpful for impaired people and will be displayed in case of problem with image loading.

Place your keywords wisely because this tag is another key to boost your SEO. The length of the textual alternative must be less than 80 characters.

7.       Optimize the number of Links associated: Too many links in a page decrease the importance of each of them. The excessive use of links can be similar to spam indexing for search engines and you would lose efficiency.

More than 100 links must be avoided. If you can't avoid it, spread your links over several pages.

8.       Title Coherence: The <title> tag must contain the main keywords used in the redaction of your page. The theme of the page in question must be clearly described.

If not, either your title is not representative of your page, or keywords of your page are not properly optimized.

Avoid default titles such as "no title", "new document", "homepage” as well as generic titles that don't reveal your keywords such as "Welcome to my website!"

9.       Keyword Density: The keyword density refers to the number of times a same word appears on a web page. The keyword density value takes into account the context and semantics related to keywords (text in bold, h1, links…).

7 C's of Website Traffic Driving Strategy

7 C's of Website Traffic Driving Strategy

There are seven design elements – 7Cs – that should be considered when creating a website intended for commerce and sales. Customers shop online for several reasons; the most important are the convenience, cost, large selection and the allure of control over their purchases. Customers can easily shop around from anywhere they have an Internet connection; this gives companies an even greater imperative to create a website that will drive traffic to their website, appeal to their target markets, and create a lasting experience that will create return customers.

Create an explanation of your website that will include all of the design elements that drive customer experience. (you do not have to create an actual website)

Get out some paper and draw a map of what your destination site will look like and what amenities you will be including. What are some of the activities your visitors can partake in and how do these relate to your eco-mission?

• Context : A website’s layout and overall visual design needs to be uncluttered, easy to read and navigate, the color scheme needs to be appropriate for the marketing design. Having some white space will also aid in the overall design and readability.
• Commerce : If the website is intended for commercial transactions, then it has to be safe and the fact that is has been made safe must be communicated to the customer, most websites use a "lock" symbol in the corner to indicate that it has been encrypted.
• Connection : Any links that lead the customer away from the website.
• Communication : How the company talks to its customers ; this can be done through signing up for special offers, email newsletters, contests, surveys, live chat with company representatives, and company contact information.
• Content : The text, graphics, sound, music, and/or videos that are presented.
• Community : The website may allow interaction between customers through message boards and live chat.
• Customization : Companies can allow customers to personalize aspects of the website or it may tailor itself to different users, for example having different colors and graphics for people who speak different languages.

GENERATE LEADS FOR YOUR BUSINESS USING SOCIAL MEDIA

Almost 40% of the total world population is on Internet as of now. The growth curve of the Internet has escalated drastically since 1995 from just 1% to 40%, so you can imagine the potential of Internet and the social media.

To generate leads using Social media we need to understand what actually comprises of Social Media. Social media is a computer mediated tool that allows people or companies to create, share, or exchange information, career interests,ideas, and pictures/videos in virtual communities and networks. It is a platform which anybody could use to share or find anything. 

Here are a few techniques to grab leads using social media:

1. Chose your Platform wisely: Before choosing to use social media to generate your business you must identify the use of any social networking site. You must know the specific purposes of each platform you wish to use to grab your target leads.
   
2. Identify Your Audience Well: Let’s suppose you have an incredibly ingenious product designed specially for non vegetarians and your product is highly desirable, but if you are selling that product in Gujarat or Rajasthan then you are not going to sell many as those two are the states with most number of vegetarians.Before you can seek out your audience, you must identify them. Are your typical customers male or female? Are they young or old? How much money do they make? What are some of their likes and dislikes? Are they local to you, or do they live all over the world? Are they a certain ethnicity, or do they come from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds?Once you have a clear picture of who your ideal customers are, you can use this information to determine where they hang out online.
3. Optimize your contents to keep your audience interested: You know who your prospective customers are but they don’t know about you. Why should they come to you? Be interesting, be entertaining and be informative with your content. Be reliable, be dependable and don’t ask for anything in return. Soon your prospective customers will find you.
4. Have a blog on your website: You should have an integrated blog on your website. You should be addressing current issues that your customers are facing, updates on your business and daily ramblings. You should be sharing these posts on social media. People are quick to dismiss the brands that they believe will not deliver the services they require. By becoming the go-to person in your industry, you will attract more customers and strengthen existing relationships.
5. Utilise the multiple channels effectively: It is worth knowing that the most popular networking websites are: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. Each social media channel boasts their own community. You should adapt your long-term plan to each community accordingly. Have a clear focus, be consistent and prove your expertise. Utilise multiple channels and cross promote. Nonetheless it is better to be actively involved with one or two social channels, than to be spread thinly with no given direction on them all.
6. Keep an eye on your the analytics: You must use analytics to measure your success on social media. Google Analytics is a free tool and easy to use and learn about your customers which include their demographics, geographic locations, behaviour and the degree of interest to your website or product.
7. Conclusion: Most of the leads generated online are through Social media so keep posting and keep your audience interested. Besides generating leads you also help create brand awareness and a chance to create an excellent customer delight.