A lot of Indian blogs on blogger seem to have had their TLDs changed from .com to .in. We picked this up today morning and are investigating to see if this is a widespread issue. Strangely, not too many others are talking about this on the internet or blogosphere. It might be because blogger quiety redirects the browser from the original .com URL to the new .in URL. Is this a country specific thing or only in India? India has been known to be a source of a lot of web spam. Blogger is but naturally a victim of such spammy content. This writer’s personal blog was affected – so if they are really looking at spammy, promotional content before deciding to move TLDs, they need to look harder!

2011 was an exciting year for web/application developers at Envigo. The driver was the growth in the mobile and social web. Several studies and statistics pointed at the new customer playgrounds  – places where customers were spending a lot of their time. Clients finally started to take the plunge. Better still, clients agreed to extend a campaign’s touch-points into the mobile and social domains. A campaign could therefore have its micro-site backed by search and banner advertising, but customers could also interact with the campaign on a mobile app or through their facebook wall. Our clients successfully create digital multi-platform marketing campaigns – generating awareness through search and banner advertising, letting the community compete over games and contests on Facebook and finding a way to reach his pocket inside a mobile app.

In 2011, Envigo’s web development team were contacted to provide the following kinds of applications:

• Web development – 2011 was a big year for Ecommerce websites in India.  Businesses finally believe that online ordering has come of age and did not need to be limited only to online travel. Envigo worked on one of India’s most exclusive loyalty programs (Read this blog on Club ITC) and also on an food ordering and home delivery website for a start-up. The requirements for website development almost always included social and search engine friendly modules.
• Facebook applications to generate engagement – Envigo worked on developing games, quizzes, polls, contests, profile pic editors for various fan pages. There were some projects which were for enabling lead capture and tactical promotions. Applications were used to maintain a high level of engagement on the Facebook pages and give fans novel ways of engaging with the Pages, its community and with their friends. We also noted that Facebook is gradually launching platform features which used to be apps earlier. (A lot of the work which we had done for Diditz is now part of Timeline and Facebook photos. We are in no way claiming that Facebook’s product roadmap is being influenced by Envigo, however it is nice to see some of our thinking being validated)
• Mobile applications to drive customer utility – Envigo worked on a few mobile apps which were light on branding specific benefits, but focused more on customer utility. Max Bupa’s HealthFirst application was one of the apps we were involved in. By limiting the apps only for customer utility more than direct sales or lead capture led to an increase in downloads in the initial few weeks and also in the number of times an app was used.

Location and identity should be the two important themes for apps in 2012. Using apps which deliver personalised information depending upon your location will be interesting. It will not only be pull information, which is similar to ‘Google search on mobile’ today, in which a user shares his location and gets algorithmically filetered information directly on the mobile phone. By sharing location with marketeers in a strictly policed (read anti-spam) environment, a customer will be able to enjoy highly relevant information exactly when she needs it.

Think about the possibility when you enter a mall and your phone lights up to tell you that the shoes you have been planning to buy are on the first floor at 30% off!

That’s what we are working on now – watch this space!

ITC hotels and Wills Lifestyle have just launched the Club ITC program. A member will earn points at over 45 ITC Hotels and 75 Wills Lifestyle stores in the country in this program. The Program promises to have exciting redemption options.

Here are some screen shots from one of the most exclusive loyalty programs in the country.

The website has a .NET powered front-end.

2011 has been a great year for Envigo. It has gone past very quickly and has not had a dull moment.
I think that means that we were all very busy – growing, hiring, developing new services and products and becoming better at our jobs.
Envigo.co.uk has undergone a revamp – it needs to get one every year or so – only to keep up with the changes at Envigo.
We have invested in improving our processes and in creating IP in some of the fields we work in. We created many different tools – a tool for tracking Fans and engagement for any brand page on Facebook, a tool to manage link building activity and many different games and applications for the facebook pages we manage.
We have made significant inroads in mobile devices. Appavatar, which is Envigo’s mobile division, now has capabilities in Symbian, Iphone and Android platforms. We have made a provisional filing for our first patent on mobile authentication. We are working to launch our first product – a new service which will help brands connect with customers in new and unexpected ways.
Back in Envigo, we will launch LinkedListin early 2012. It is an SEO management tool, which will be used to track and control link building and also provide direct access to clients.
We went to WTM 2011 and met over 150 potential partners. Some of our work was appreciated and I hope that such visits will add to our list of clients and content customers.
Watch this space for all the new rollouts promised for 2012!

SEO! Yes, thats right!
While working on a potential project for a government body, we had to review the www.nic.in portal and get some information from it about its services. While we were doing that, we came across a page – How to Promote your website?

This page has a list of tips for a webmaster – right from choosing his keywords, writing title and meta tags, advice about image and video alt tags. It even advises users to replace words like “about us” with the name of the organisation to make it more keyword rich.

The Indian government sure is set to go places!

Envigo is offering the following positions in Vasant Kunj, New Delhi

1. Junior SEO

2. Applications Developer (PHP)

3. SEM (PPC) analyst

4. Content writer

You can get more details here and can also apply online. Go for it, we are waiting to hear from you.

This business segment is new. Ten years ago,  an online marketing agency was hard to conceive. True, the internet existed, but not many marketing budgets had a line for ‘SEO’ or ‘PPC’. There might have been a line for ‘Website banner advertisement’ but definitely not so in India.

Today, our breed is thriving. Everyone has an online marketing agency or is planning to get one. Companies now have an ‘online marketing manager’ and even are trying out ‘ SEO Manager’ and ‘Affiliate Marketing Manager’.

Ten years from now, there might not be a search engine result page to compete for ranks. The web will be much more semantic – deriving meaning not only from the content of a page, but also by the structure of information arrangement. The web might also be omnipresent, with very blurred and/or thin lines between the desktop, the mobile and home appliances. Marketing to consumers will evolve and so will we.

About 15 years ago, there was a hallowed professional called the stock broker.  Either way the market went, the stock broker was earning his cut. Then came the electronic stock exchanges who charged razor thin margins. The stock broker had to reinvent himself. He is now usually managing portfolios. He has to advise and he has to predict and he has to earn his commission on performance and not on transacting.

This industry will also get paid only on performance and will have to adapt and learn new technologies. We will have to run very hard to keep us from falling behind.  Devices will start talking to other devices and to banks. Privacy laws will become tougher, but there will be much more data to play with. Customers might block away unsolicited ads completely but will also begin to solicit in an informed manner. The website will

The mobile revolution is just a trailer of the entire reinvention movie. It is exciting – much in the same way a roller coaster is.

Every one who wants to make it big developing Iphone apps needs to know how much money the existing 200,000 applications are making. I came across a survey of 96 iphone developers and wanted to summarise the post here:

• Average number of apps sold – 101,024
• Price point – $0.99 (The average is higher at $5.49 because of a $49.99 outlier)
• Average number of updates – 3.89
• Average total development cost – $6,453 (but developers rarely included their own time spent in development, which would increase the costs a few times)

Even with a higher development cost, the app world is highly profitable. No wonder there are over 200,000 applications, but this field is set to grow further.

• The market is top heavy, the top 10% apps would be getting the bulk of the revenue
• Greatest contributor to sales – Being featured by Apple in some way, in place of sending out an app update

We believe that we live in a world which does a lot of things on the internet, and very soon, will be doing most of it, on mobile. Can you imagine the look you will get if you tell a business partner that you do not have email? Just a few years ago, it would not have raised eyebrows.

Customers are getting onto the mobile bus in droves. In the US, data usage of mobile phones has surpassed voice.  In India, mobile operators are busy bidding for the 3G licenses. Apparently, they want to use the 3G bandwidth for 2G phones, because they are starved of spectrum.

In the not too distant future, a customer might expect video reviews of products streaming onto their location-aware mobile as they pass by a store. They would discuss it with their friends and family on their always on, 3G-enabled social network and then order it by dragging the video into their shopping cart. They would then pay for it using their phone provider’s monthly billing cycle.

The applications used in the paragraph above exist and are in use today.

Are you ready?

Large organisations have product roadmaps which look ahead 1-3 years. Smaller organisations have a mix of look-ahead and what-next plans which take them from quarter to quarter or year to year. There are firms who are working on their “20092010 online marketing strategy” because that is what it essentially is – the same story in a new page template.

Envigo is here to help. We have set our house in order and are now able to offer development services on mobiles – Iphones, Android, Samsung and Nokia!

In our line of work, we spend a lot of time with Article websites. An article website is a website which accepts articles. It allows users to publish articles by subject. Once an article is submitted, it is reviewed by the website owners before publishing. A published article can then attract comments, and more importantly, attracts visitors. Visitors come through search engine results, in which the article might start to appear. The article website makes money by selling these visitor driven impressions on ad networks, such as Google ads.

A well designed article site therefore acts as a machine in perpetual motion. Articles are submitted by authors, who want to establish themselves or want to gain links. Every article can have a few links, which are inserted by the article owner. It is quite common for search engine optimisers to submit articles to gain these links.

An article website is a barter marketplace – Authors submit articles to gain recognition and links. Article websites offer both and want the uniquely written article content in return.

This is where our problem begins. Article website accept articles with links. We are happy with the link we get. However, what happens with some of the article websites is this -

1. Article websites remove the links a few months after the article is published
2. Article websites might insert their own links into articles
3. Article websites might remove the entire article after a few months

The marketplace of links-for-content also places a reduced value on the quality of the content. This is often capitalised by the authors, who regularly rehash their articles and lead to content and SERP spam.

What would be interesting would be to have an article website, which accepts only good quality content, and gives out perpetual links in return.

Here’s hoping for that to happen!