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How to verify your Google DFP Ads from other countries?

Leave a Comment / Ad manager, DFP, Google, how to, Tech tips / By

One of the challenges that Google DFP (Ad manager) account managers especially those who are new often face is to set up different Ad banners for different regions or countries and to test them out. The challenge is not to set up different Ad banners since that can be easily done by creating different line items and selecting target criteria and setting Geography. Challenge is to verify whether correct banners appear in targeted region or country?

One can easily verify the Ad banners for the country or region he or she is browsing in but to verify Ad banners in other countries either you need a remote server in all those regions or countries or use some good proxy. You may also seek help of your friends if you are lucky enough to have friends in all those countries.

If you don’t have access to all the things mentioned above, try this simple technique and you would be able to see Ad banners from most parts of the world. Visit some performance testing website which has option to select country and which also provides screen shots in result set.

Two such websites are http://www.webpagetest.org/ and http://loads.in/. By using these websites you would be able to verify which Ad banners appear in different countries. Using this technique you can test any public web page and make sure that Ad is rendering fine without any hiccups.

Presentation embed that Empowers Bloggers

Leave a Comment / how to, News, start-up, Tech tips / By

World’s second largest online presentation sharing website authorSTREAM, today, launched a new presentation embed which can automatically decide on the fly as to which player to show to your blog readers. On flash devices, a flash player capable of playing animation, transitions and audio is rendered while viewers of non flash devices like iPad see a HTML player which sans animation and sound but displays text and images.

authorSTREAM has created it’s own niche as a presentation player which replicates slide show experience online by retaining the basic elements of a PowerPoint like animations, transitions and sound.

Below is complete press release from authorSTREAM:
authorSTREAM, an online presentation-sharing platform, has just released Dynamic Embed, a new feature that works smoothly with all flash and non-flash devices, thereby empowering blog and website owners by relieving them of the former hassle of reformatting their presentations for multiple PowerPoint-sharing platforms. Even more, it offers the best possible viewing experience for users of blogs and websites, resulting in satisfied site visitors that will return again and again.

With Dynamic Embed, bloggers and website owners no longer have to modify their presentations to suit the needs of various viewing platforms, because they can easily embed their presentations in a way that can be viewed on all devices—including flash devices like personal computers and laptops, as well as non-flash devices like iPhones and iPads. In addition, this intelligent embed automatically detects whether a viewer is using a flash-supported device or a non-flash-supported device and then renders a compatible presentation, without any need for manual formatting. Dynamic Embed also supports animations, transitions, sounds, rehearsed timings, and other special effects on flash devices like computers and laptops.

Harman Singh, CEO of authorSTREAM says, “This will have far-reaching benefits for bloggers and website owners, who earlier had to sacrifice animations and other multimedia effects from their presentation so that it met the requirements of online sharing platforms. The bloggers [and website owners] were left with no option but to choose static presentation output on their blogs and websites, as it could be viewed on all devices. Not anymore with Dynamic Embed.”

Users of Dynamic Embed can easily access the feature from an authorSTREAM tab conveniently located next to the uploaded presentation. From there, users can even customize the feature with their preference of color theme, border color, embed size, border size, and more, giving their presentations a unique appearance.

About authorSTREAM: With more than 4 million registered users and 5 million monthly visitors, authorSTREAM is the second largest slide-sharing platform. Launched in 2007, it is a free online community that gives members access to thousands of presentations on hundreds of subjects. With authorSTREAM, you can upload your PowerPoint presentations for free and share them with your friends, students, colleagues, and peers across the globe.

How to get to million users in a short span?

Leave a Comment / start-up / By
For any start-up, getting a user base of million users is counted as a big achievement. For some it may be a break even situation and for others it may be the right time for pitching the product to investors to raise funding. It may take years for any start-up to get to the magic number of one million. Besides offering a quality product, start-ups need to work out SEO, SEM with a strong presence on various social media platforms. As the financial and human resources are limited for most of the start-ups so every small decision  can make and mar the future growth of the product.

Here are some quick tips from Adam Smith, the founder of  Xobni (Outlook add-in) and Drew Houston, the founder of  Dropbox on how to get from Zero to a Million Users.

VigLink, easiest way to monetize the links

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VigLink enables you to get paid for doing what you normally do on your blog or site. Whenever you link to a product, website, or promotion, VigLink turns that link into an affiliate link so that you receive a commission for any purchases made. On your webpage you probably already link to a number of recommended products or companies, but only affiliate links allow you to get paid if one of your visitors makes a purchase at the linked site. Specifically, an affiliate link tells a site that its customer has come from your site, so you can receive a commission on the sale. VigLink automatically affiliates the links in your content. VigLink follows along with clicks leaving your site. When a reader buys something, you get paid. Here are two videos which explains it all.




Why Facebook is so important like SEO for a website or brand?

Leave a Comment / Facebook, SEO, Tech tips / By

There isn’t any doubt that today Facebook plays a very important role in overall social media and marketing strategy for promoting a brand, website or an Android/ iPhone app.  Facebook with its unique and developer friendly APIs and  easy access beats Twitter and other social media networks  in creating that viral effect for your website.

Facebook with more than 800 million active users is not less important than SEO. If you plan strategically, Facebook can be a huge source of user acquisition and engagement for your website, blog or mobile app.

Use Facebook comment box and Like button

As per Facebook an average Facebook user has 130 friends. This means that any activity, status update done by a Facebook user on his /her wall reaches at least 130 Facebook users and a single comment, like of such wall post will make it reach another 130 Facebook users.

Since around 400 million users  logs in to Facebook everyday, it make sense that you use  Facebook Like and Facebook comment box on your website or blog. Each like or comment posted using Facebook comment box is gonna increase your reach by 130 times.

Do remember that Facebook comment box is Java Script based hence your comments might not get indexed. However, you can do some smart work here by fetching comments using Facebook API and keeping them in page source  so that s search bots are able to see them. That way you would be able to leverage the viral  impact of Facebook comments and meanwhile will not loose on SEO.

Create an Facebook APP 

Think of an engaging Facebook app which can generate that viral effect (think of another “FarmVille” or Takethislollipop). Whatever is the concept or use case of your app, make sure to prompt app users  to share their app activities, comments and status on their wall. Be bit innovative to make app users seek help, opinion of their friends.

Do get offline access permission from app users. Offline access to user’s wall will let you post text, videos, images on their walls. You can use this permission to occasionally post  some interesting stuff on app user’s wall so that people in their friend circle get curios about your app.

Accelerate user acquisition  with Facebook login

Who loves to create accounts on dozen websites and remember all those user-names and passwords. It’s a well known fact that most of internet users avoid filling up registration forms to get access to a website. Sometimes websites loose potential customers just because of this cumbersome registration process.

Use Facebook login or “registration via Facebook’ to let people get access to your website and that too without filling up  any sign-up form.  You just need to create a Facebook app to provide login with Facebook or register with Facebook on your website.

There is no point of not using Facebook login on your website when Facebook lets you save user’s profile information (name, image) including user’s email address (probably that’s the main reason websites have their own sign-up forms).

Let your mobile phone app go viral with Facebook

More than  350 million users access Facebook from a mobile device every month. If you have a  iPhone or Android app, you must check out Mobile section of Facebook developers.  Facebook developer’s mobile section has lot of  things in its kitty which can help you spread the word about your app, increase user base, enhance user experience and engagement.

If you haven’t  done all these things yet, it’s high time that you get started with Facebook.

Download documents from Scribd without uploading or paying for downloads

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Many of you must be aware of the fact that document sharing website Scribd now ask users to either upload  a document or buy monthly/yearly download pass which costs from $5 to $59  to download the documents  because of archive feature which was rolled out last year.

Scribd never pays the actual authors or content uploader for such downloads. There are thousands of good documents on Scribd and most of them will not download until  you pay for the download pass or upload a document as mentioned in the screen shot above.

However, there is a simple hack using which can download documents (Obviously only those for which download is allowed) without paying for the download pass or uploading a document. This is possible via Scribd’s mobile website. Here you go:

  1. Open Scribd using your mobile device
  2. Search for the document and click “Download now” button
  3.  Download now button on  mobile device doesn’t ask for any upload or download pass. Download starts as soon as you click download.
  4. If you don’t have mobile device, download is till possible by using http://www.scribd.com/mobile/ URL on your laptop or desktop
  5. Let’s say you have searched a document on scribd.com on your desktop or laptop  with URL http://www.scribd.com/doc/37644657/Function-Point
  6. Copy the document ID from the URL (In this case it is  37644657) and append at the end after ‘documents’ http://www.scribd.com/mobile/documents/ to make it http://www.scribd.com/mobile/documents/37644657. You will now see the option to download the PDF file which allows you to download without uploading or paying for the download.

Go, download your favorite e-books, PDFs before Scribd puts validations on mobile version of the website too.