Kolkata, the cultural capital of India, is not just renowned for its rich heritage but also for its esteemed institutions of higher education. Among them, the MBA colleges stand out as beacons of excellence, shaping the leaders of tomorrow. Here’s a roundup of the top 10 MBA colleges in Kolkata, known for their academic rigor, industry connections, and holistic development approach:

1) Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIMC)

As one of the premier management institutes in the country, IIM Calcutta consistently ranks among the top B-schools globally. With world-class faculty, cutting-edge research, and a diverse student community, IIMC offers a transformative learning experience.

2) Xavier School of Management (XLRI)

XLRI, located in Jamshedpur with a campus in Kolkata, is renowned for its commitment to excellence and ethics in management education. With a focus on sustainable business practices and social responsibility, XLRI prepares leaders with a conscience.

3) Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management (IISWBM)

Established in 1953, IISWBM is one of the oldest B-schools in India. Known for its industry-oriented curriculum and strong corporate partnerships, IISWBM offers specialized MBA programs catering to diverse career aspirations.

4) International Management Institute Kolkata (IMI Kolkata)

IMI Kolkata, an initiative of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, is committed to grooming socially responsible leaders equipped to tackle global challenges. With a blend of academic rigor and experiential learning, IMI Kolkata fosters innovation and entrepreneurship.

5) Army Institute of Management Kolkata (AIM)

AIM Kolkata, affiliated with the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, focuses on developing leaders with a strong sense of discipline and integrity. With a faculty comprising experienced professionals, AIM Kolkata offers a conducive learning environment.

6) Heritage Business School (HBS)

HBS, affiliated with the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, emphasizes holistic development through a blend of academics, industry exposure, and extracurricular activities. With state-of-the-art infrastructure and experienced faculty, HBS nurtures future-ready professionals.

7) Globsyn Business School (GBS)

GBS, known for its innovative pedagogy and industry-aligned curriculum, aims to bridge the gap between academia and industry. With a focus on experiential learning and skill development, GBS prepares students for leadership roles in a dynamic business environment.

8) Future Institute of Engineering and Management (FIEM)

FIEM, affiliated with the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, offers MBA programs designed to equip students with the skills and knowledge needed to excel in the corporate world. With a strong emphasis on research and practical learning, FIEM fosters a culture of innovation.

9) Budge Budge Institute of Technology (BBIT)

BBIT, affiliated with the West Bengal University of Technology, is known for its industry-oriented MBA programs and emphasis on professional development. With a focus on nurturing leadership qualities and entrepreneurship skills, BBIT prepares students for success in the competitive business landscape.

10) Eastern Institute for Integrated Learning in Management (EIILM)

EIILM, recognized for its multidisciplinary approach to management education, offers MBA programs tailored to meet the evolving needs of the industry. With a focus on soft skills development and experiential learning, EIILM empowers students to become effective leaders and change-makers.

In conclusion, Kolkata’s MBA colleges offer a diverse array of opportunities for aspiring management professionals. Whether it’s the academic rigor of IIM Calcutta, the ethical leadership focus of XLRI, or the industry-oriented programs of institutes like IISWBM and IMI Kolkata, these institutions play a pivotal role in shaping the future leaders of the business world. With their strong emphasis on innovation, ethics, and social responsibility, Kolkata’s MBA colleges continue to uphold the city’s legacy of excellence in education.

The first thing to remember is that people come to facebook to get updates from their family & friends & not to see your ad. With so many ads flooding in the user’s feed, your ad should have good design, has to be creative, attractive, colourful, stylish, text having the clear message & appealing enough to stand out from the rest & lure the users to engage with the ad. You can do something funny with it or blend it with trends, etc. You’re basically introducing your brand, your content, so make it such that people share it with their friends.

Suppose every competitor of yours are running an ad stating 50 % sale, so if you also run an ad of 50 % sale, the users become blind to that same kind of ads & likely to scroll by, so you have to offer something different. Convey a message in your ad as if they’re already missing out something & they should avail your product or services to keep up.

Loading time for your landing page should be less & should also be interesting enough to retain the users interest or excitement. Facebook also judges your ads based on the loading time & content in the landing page.

Success rates of fb ads depends on proper audience targeting. It has huge no. of options available for targeting audience especially with fb pixel installed in your website. The more detailed & properly the audience is targeted, the relevent score goes up & the CRM goes down making your ad cheaper.

The more relevant facebook predicts an ad will be to an user, the less it will cost the advertiser to show the ad to that user.

Facebook is mainly used to advertise B2C services.

Download Social Media calendar from net to excel

Importance of Facebook Page & Group in driving traffic to your sales funnel ?

You should have a business page, facebook group, where you can post content for your users. Now if you only post marketing & promotional content, the users are unlikely to engage & may unfollow your page & leave the group. So, its recommend to add some value or information to your post first & then try to sell. You’ll have to reply to each of your customers to build trust & try to create an emotional bonding with your brand just like Apple & many more out there.

You can also conduct a poll to know the needs & demands of your existing customers. You can share blog posts, share case studies, conduct events, presentations, live interactive interview with an expert or webinar or conduct workshops, contests & give some discount vouchers to increase audience engagement. Also you need to maintain consistency with your page activity. Whatever you do, your ultimate goal is to drive the audience to your sales funnel.

How to drive more audience to like your page ?

Though likes in a facebook page is not that important anymore if you want to show your page post organically to your followers as facebook is decreasing it’s organic reach, but it can help in branding, social proof, etc.

Run ads; keep low likes, relevant & targeted; getting fake likes or likes from irrelevant profiles won’t serve any purpose; focus on quality likes than quantity; As you know, posts don’t reach all people organically who likes your page, so it increases the probability of showing a post to someone irrelevant instead of someone to whom it’d have mattered.

Run a campaign to like your page targeting users who have visited your website in the last certain amount of days & excluding those who have already liked your page. This way the ad is only shown to people who have already visited your website & knows you or your brand, & hence will be quality likes.

If post performs well organically, then only boost it.

Why Facebook Ads ?

Demand Generation – brand awareness & demand generation – one can create demand

They charge for impressions based on how many people are targeting the same audience

Target right audience – fb has a lot lot of information about you which they collect from your every action on facebook, so they can target the right audience

Funnel – Awareness > interest > consider buying > buy > loyal customers > refers to others. Don’t try to sell directly.

Create > Ads > choose marketing objective > 3 category(awareness, consideration, conversion) >

Run Facebook Ads

1. Categorize your target audiences. (for e.g. housewives, students, small business owners, etc) i.e. all these categories are your target audience, but you create separate audience sets for each category & run separate ads to each audience category to make it appealing to them because each category may vary in terms of SM platform presence, format of content, area of interest, etc. So, you have to show separate ads for same objective to each of these categories in terms of what’s appealing to them.
2. Design your ad well; invest on graphic designing & copywriting
3. Do A/B Testing on the basis of ad design, audience targeting, etc
4. Suppose for example, you are doing A/B Test of 5 ads in an ad set, & after a week you see 2 ads are performing well while other 3 are not, so you get rid of those 3 ads, & continue to run those 2 ads, & you design another 3 new ads to run & again see the results after a week & act accordingly. Repeat this every week to perfect your ad as much as possible.

How to create brand awareness using Facebook ?

Audiences

There are 3 types of audiences you choose from

Custom audience – In this case, you have to create the audience by yourself by proper targeting or with details received from Facebook Pixel if already installed in your website.

Lookalike audience – Facebook creates a set of audience similar to your chosen category of custom audience. You can choose between 1% to 10% the total population of the country you choose. The narrow the audience, the CPC & frequency(number of times an ad is shown to a person) is higher & vice versa. It is very useful in reaching new similar audiences.

Saved Audience – These are the set of audience you save after you create custom & lookalike audiences, for future use.

After posting an ad, after it reaches a certain amount of audience, it often starts repeating the ad to same users, who are less likely to click in that same ad impression further if they haven’t clicked or even if they have clicked in the first impression of the ad, they may get irritated & hide that ad or worst, hide all ads from your page. To avoid this, click on that particular ad campaign, go to “People reached” option where the frequency(average time an audience is shown that ad) is shown. It is recommended after the frequency reaches 3, stop running that ad & create a new ad for that same campaign & same audience. The more the frequency goes up(number of times an ad is shown to an user), the relevant score(shown in the extreme right of that particular ad column, the more it is the more relevant the ad) goes down & the CPM also goes up for that ad. Vice versa, the higher the relevant score, the CPM goes down for that ad. The relevant score also depends on how properly you’ve targeted your audience. If you haven’t targeted properly, it may show to irrelevant people & the relevant score will go down.

Relevancy score mainly depends on 3 factors – How your ad is performing, User engagement & Negative feedback of the ad by any user. In short, how people are reacting to your ad.

So, its better to stop showing the same ad to targeted audience multiple times & create a lookalike audience to reach new audience who are similar to the existing audience. Lookalike audience plays a vital role in able to reach to new & similar audiences.

Audience Insights – You can create your own audience here by filtering from the left sidebar & it will show you the potential audiences your ad can reach.

Designing a Facebook Ad

Design & Copywriting plays an important role in engagement of the audience with the ad. You can do basic graphic designing from Canva & other similar sites. You can also hire a freelancer graphic designer & copywriter & get your ad designed from sites like Fiverr, Freelancer, etc.

Before you start designing the ad, you should be clear about who your target market is, intent of the ad, audience type, their location, which language to use, brand value in the eyes of people.

You can look for your competitors’ keywords to reach their audience and can also survey their audience to find what they like. Also, if you’re a retailer & don’t have a good brand name in the market, you can run ads by the name of the big brand, whose products you’re selling to capture people’s attention.

AB Testing – You should always prepare multiple ad copies to see which one performs well. What big corporate marketers do is they split test multiple ad copies, observes for a week which one performs well, then eliminate the ones not performing & again introduce new variations to the ones performing well & the chain goes on like this every week & their ads keep on improving.

For example you can AB Test with different designs, images, text/no text in body & images, headline, choice of colour, etc. You can also test with different types of ads like images, video, slideshows, carousals, instant experience, etc. to see which one performs better.

Facebook Pixel

Facebook Pixel is a javascript code given by facebook to paste it in the header section of your website or landing page, so that facebook can collect data from your website & show analytics, track conversions from ads(custom conversions), optimize ads for conversions(use the tracked conversion data to further target similar audience who will likely convert), build custom audiences & lookalike audiences based on visitors & the data collected from website, retarget audience who have visited your website in a certain time interval, etc.

In order for Facebook Pixel to track data of an user visiting your website, the user must be logged in Facebook with the same browser, otherwise facebook cannot collect the user’s data.

How to install Facebook Pixel ? – Go to Ads Manager > on the top left, click on Ads Manager > under Measure & Reports, click Pixel.

Click on create a Pixel > copy & paste the javascript code in the header section of every page of your website. If you’re having wordpress website, you can install a plugin to add the code to your website. And facebook will now start collecting data from your website.

Custom conversions – If you’re running the ad for conversions, then custom conversions will be useful. You’ve to enter a landing page url that is a page that customers are landed once they convert, so once they click on an ad & end up on that landing page, a very small invisible pixel will upload on that page that will send data to facebook that the audience have converted from that ad. It also helps when you’re running multiple ads for same conversion & redirecting to same landing page after conversion & see which one is more effective as it will give the data which ad made more conversions.

Conversion optimization – To run conversion optimized ads, you need to have 2 things in place beforehand – 1) Facebook Pixel installed in your website, 2) custom conversions created, 3) audience created(or can create it in the ad itself). For ads you want to run to increase conversions, go to Create Ads > under conversion, choose conversions > scroll down & give a campaign name & continue. Enter the information asked by facebook & create your ad. So, facebook will show the ad only to people who they think is likely to convert.

Facebook initially shows the ad to a particular set of people, observes who converts & who not, then shows the ad to similar audiences who are converting having same charateristics or interests or activity or engagements & are likely to convert. But initially it takes time for facebook to test & understand which category of users converts well, so it will take time for the ad to start performing better & you should not panic initially for not getting good result.

Facebook needs a minimum 50 conversions beforehand running the ad because the delivery system needs data points to find people who are likely to take the action your ad set is optimized for.

Facebook Pixel Standard Events

4% Rule

You may have noticed facebook pages where there’re millions of likes & but post engagements are hardly a few hundreds, whereas, pages where there are a few thousand likes but post engagements are quiet high compared to the former, say a thousand. So, the former page is not able to engage its existing audience or the likes are just fake or paid.

Facebook first shows the post to a few people who have liked your page & sees how much engagement the post is getting. Depending on the results, it decides whether to show it to further users or not. If the post gets more engagement, it may also be shown to users who haven’t liked or followed your page but engages in that type of posts. If not it won’t be even shown to the people who liked the page as facebook wants to show its users post that they engage more to increase their time spent in facebook. So, the next question is

How to engage your existing audience in a Facebook Page/Group ?

So, let’s say there is already a million audience base, but engagements are few hundreds or a few thousands. The first thing you need to know is what kind of posts are getting more engagements from the audience. For this, experiment with posts – post images, GIFs, graphics, videos, interviews, podcasts, webinars, funny moments, memes, ask questions, texts with emojis, go live, whatever you can & observe what type posts are getting more engagement & which aren’t for say a month. If you observe a certain type of post or category of posts are getting more engagements while the others are not, get rid of what’s not working & instead focus & introduce variations in the top engagement posts to see if you can increase your engagements even more. Usually posts asking questions, generating curiocity attract more user engagement.

Along with content, you can also conduct contests, workshops, create controversies in comment sections to increase audience engagement.

Also while experimenting with posts, you can post at different times of a day & observe which post is getting more engagement, so you try pushing important posts to that time interval & other casual stuffs to off time. You can get that data from Facebook Analytics. Try to mix the posts with what’s trending now in that platform to further increase user engagement.

Also facebook asks to reply to a message in a page as quickly as possible, facebook sees how active your page is by how much time you’re taking to reply, so better to auto reply.

Now, the users keeps on liking more & more pages, so it’s not possible for Facebook to show every posts from every pages, because of the huge competition among pages who wants to put their posts in those user’s timeline. So, it will only show posts to users facebook thinks is relevent to the user’s interest. So you need to turn on ads for your post even to reach users who had liked your page.

An organic post reach of 4% of your total likes or above is considered as good engagement & well optimized page.

Text Overlay Tool

According to facebook, ad images with less than 20% text perform better or reach more people except book/album covers, album covers, product images, games, event posters, charts and graphs, magazine & newspaper covers, films and show posters, etc. They recommend to use little to no text on images for the ad to perform best. If you need to add more text you may consider adding them in the body text instead of in the image. To know more, read their guidelines here. Its recommended to check your image or thumbnail(in case of video) whether it is following the guidelines or not to reach maximum target.

Messenger Bot

Chatfuel, Mobilemonkey ….. More open rates than email, easy to communicate with customers,

Facebook Ads

Redirect clicks from your facebook to outside for e.g. your’ website’s landing pages where you can take their e-mail/register/sign up. If you keep them inside facebook, you’ll have to operate under facebook’s terms & condition which may have restrictions in terms of reaching them, like in a facebook page, but once you take them outside & take their details, you’ll be free to reach them. However, if you keep them inside facebook, you’ll get more reach, whereas if you link it to external links, facebook may reduce its reach.

User Engagement – First fb shows the post to a few people, sees their response, then decides whether to show it further to others or not. Boosted post also if not getting proper user engagement, fb won’t show it to its users & if still boosted will cost higher to run such ad. If user engagement is more on a boosted post, fb will show it to more people(also organically) & cost per reach will go down. If you keep users on fb, such as with image posts, lead ads, fb shows it to more users & charges less than posts that contains link that will redirect to your landing page.

Facebook ads image size 600 X 600. can resize image from canva

dynamic ads

You can see more metrics of your ad by going to ads manager > columns, breakdown, reports (right of “view setup”)

Facebook Groups

Email to join group after collecting lead, market research, conduct polls for audience engagement & know their needs, know their interests, ask questions; while anyone asks to join group, ask for their email & phone number(lead generation), share blog link & other content links, customer support,

How to implement Bidding Strategy according to your sales funnel ?

• Cost per 1000 impression (CPM) – Brand Awareness
• Cost per click (CPC) – Interest/Consideration
• Cost per Aquisition/Conversion (CPA) – Take Action

If it feels too complicated or time-consuming, don’t worry. I can handle Facebook & Instagram Ads for you.

It is observed that brands with good offline marketing performs better in online marketing than brands who concentrate only on online marketing.

Marketing is all about experimenting & keeping up with the trend. You’ve to keep experimenting with different things & observe which works better for your business.

The main advantages of Social Media Marketing(SMM) is you can market your brand worldwide at a very lower cost & to a targeted audience.

With so much noise in social media & crowd of posts fighting to make it to the user’s feed, you have to make something different for the users to stop them scrolling & take notice. Social media platforms keep on bringing new types of format like reels, shorts, stories, carroussal posts, instant experience, 3D photos, camera effects, IGTV, etc. & many more on the way & these new posts usually takes time to get popular with the users, so its better to keep a track on the new features & follow the trend, post something with the new features to get notice & keep experimenting with post types to stay ahead before it gets popular & everyone starts using it.

According to a study by CISCO, 80% of the World’s Internet Traffic Will Be Video by 2021, & 13 % of them will be live video.

Local language plays an important role in marketing as you’ve to know what language your target audience uses. Even in India, local language ads performs better than English or Hindi ads.

Aim of SMM – Aim of SMM can be anything from brand awareness, brand engagement, traffic to website, generate leads, increase sales, build a community, improve PR(e.g. Red Bull Stratos), competitor analysis, see customer behaviour, conduct market research, customer interaction/engagement/providing support, etc.

Keep tracking the progress of the campaign/post/page – Things you need to keep an eye into are optimization for profile views,  reach, audience engagement rate(likes, comments, shares, CTR, website visits), leads generated, conversions(from custom conversion, revenue generated), page/posts impressions; website traffic coming from which social media (Google Analytics), no. of likes, page views, etc.

Competitor analysis – Looking to your competitor’s social media handles to see the landscape of like what kind of content they’re putting up, their social media calendar, content strategy(including frequency of posts, time of posting), which content/post format is working for them, how they’re addressing their audience, how they’re growing & engaging their audience, how they’re getting new leads, how they’re collecting data from the audience, what kind of offers they are giving, how they’re selling, & then not copy their ideas but get an idea & overview & create your own content or campaigns. Also check their review sections to get an idea of the strengths & pain points of their customers.

Buyer’s persona – Create buyer’s persona from existing website/social media handle analytics, from survey forms, get into community/social groups & conduct survey/polls, etc.

Choosing the right social media platform for your business ?

• Create audience personas to understand your audience.
• Know where your audience are
• Narrow down & pick the top 3 social media platforms that will work best for you.
• Competitor analysis – Which Social Media platform is working best for them ?(from Similarweb tool), visit their Social media handles & go through their strategy, how they are interacting with their customers or providing customer support, etc.
• What kind of content or information my audience would prefer ? (Usually video & audio content perform better)
• Required for SMM – People, tools, money, time.
• Every SM platform have their own thing that performs well like in Facebook videos perform well, in Instagram (visually appealing) images perform well, Twitter helps you reach directly to your customers, Tiktok content are usually consumed by casual audience, people visits Youtube for long format videos specially educative & deeply informational, etc.

Choosing the right content

• For this, experiment with posts, observe your customer behaviour & see what type of content works for you – post images, GIFs, graphics, videos, interviews, podcasts, webinars, funny moments, memes, ask questions, texts with emojis, go live, whatever you can & observe what type posts are getting more engagement & which aren’t for say a month. If you observe a certain type of post or category of posts are getting more engagements while the others are not, get rid of what’s not working & instead focus & introduce variations in the top engagement posts to see if you can increase your engagements even more. Usually posts asking questions, generating curiocity attract more user engagement.

Providing Customer Service On Social Media

• Use tools like Social mentions, Google Alerts, Hootsuite (paid), etc. to get notified on where your brand is being mentioned on the web.
• Search your keywords or hashtags as much possible to monitor what people are posting about you.
• Be quick to respond to avoid spread of negative posts.
• Competitor analysis on how your competitors are handling their customer issues.

Landing Pages

• Encourage the visitors to start conversation
• Improve shares count/social shares by placing widget or asking them to share
• Approach for Purchase/sales
• Lead generation
• Should have : short video, positive reviews of customers,
• appealing headline(first impression; should sound benefit; trigger emotional response; focus & address pain points), tools – Coschedule Headline Aanlyser
• description(copy) – first line of description should establish trust on you, write benefits in bullet points, list of important contents,
• if long video is there, state in bullet points before the video as to what exactly is there in the video(bullet points in forms of questions recommended, so to find the answers, visitors will watch the video) as that will increase the rate of opening.
• You can only add relevant content & ask for leads, for e.g. https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/insiders-kit/80-20-guide/
• have one objective at a time
• call to action button
• pop up/exit pop up
• live chat
• give free resource & collect lead
• Attach certifications from trusted bodies to increase trust among visitors
• You can tell visitors to share in social media with their hashtags to get a free resource
• write list posts, how to guides, ,

Social Selling : Attract audience > educate > engage > strike conversation > Help them > Sell

Expense in SMM – Content creation, editing, graphic designing, tools, copywriting, team, etc.

Social media calendar

Why Social Media Groups are Important & How to Grow Them ?

It is recommended to create a social media group for your customers to be able to further nurture them, keep them engaged to your brand, provide customer support & for new audiences to discover & join the group to find out more information about the brand, which will increase value & trust on your brand.

How to Influence Audience ?

Influencer marketing is an important aspect of social media marketing, where the audience is already built, trust is already there, you just need to pay to the influencer to show your product & reach their followers. It is a great way to promote new products.

People are often influenced by seeing what other people are buying or using, & the more they see other people using it, they get influenced to use it themselves. Social media is a place where people posts their updates often showing what they bought & using to show off their friends. The more friends they see buying & using a product, they get more influenced.

Also, few brands conduct lucrative contests or something else with hashtags(#) where they give something for free maybe to the first 10 posts or a discount voucher or a free trip to somewhere, etc. to engage existing audiences & post with the hashtags which makes it reach naturally to new audiences & get attention of their friends. People usually get influenced & trust the product because they see their friends using it. One of the very famous example is #kfbeerup Case Study.

Brands keep doing such contests to keep showing up in feeds & keep influencing & reach existing & new audiences.

Design as an important part of Branding in Social Media

3 things to keep in mind while branding on social media – Photography style, A particular colour or Colour palet(a combination of colours), typography(a particular font)

Good Clients value design, trust you as an expert, lets you use your creativity, value your skills, cares about you & your success as well & not just care about their own work. Bad clients are opposite of these values.

Being on time is more important than being perfect.

If it feels too complicated or time-consuming, don’t worry. I can help you build your Social Media Brand.

Google used to initially depend on other links for providing a certain information searched by a user, but now you may have noticed when you search for a certain information, sometimes Google shows certain information themselves, usually on the top of the page, then all the other links. So, I will not create content that I think that Google may give by itself or can give by itself in future. Google will show it’s own results first, then other links below. So, in order to still bring in traffic, it’s recommended to create creative content which according to you Google cannot give or create by itself in future.

How Blog Posts can generate Leads for your Business?

You may have observed whatever products or services anyone is looking for, the first thing they do is search it in Search Engines for more technical information or reviews on that product or services or basically blogs. That’s where you can get hold of them through your blog (if your blog ranks). Write a well written blog giving them the required technical information or knowledge of what people are looking for & introduce them to your product or service in a lucrative way. Of course, your blog should be in the same subject as of your product or service.

The blog can be anything containing information or knowledge people usually searches for or you can go to google search & use Google Suggest which is the drop down showing the mostly searched keywords about your product or service. Pick up those keywords, do a research on the subject if needed, then write a blog post & try to rank your blog using those keywords & at last of the blog content introduce them to your product or service in a lucrative manner.

For example if you have a Digital Marketing Consultancy in Kolkata & you write a blog post on Top 10 Digital Marketing Consultancies in Kolkata, able to rank it with keywords people mostly search for & place your consultancy in top & make it a look good & reliable option, people are likely to consider taking your services.

Even if they exit your page after viewing, you can also grab their attention one last time before they leave your page with an exit pop-up, i.e. a pop-up shows up which should likely be showing a lucrative offer like a free trail or something to attract customers.

You can also set up online chat so that while the user reads your blog, if they have any queries, they can chat with you or anyone from your team. The more effectively you reply & the more knowledgeable & reliable you can sound yourself, the more the user is going to consider your product or service.

Also you can take help of Google Search Console in case for finding new keywords. Go to Search Console Homepage > Performance > Queries & you will get the list of keywords people are searching & on which your webpages are ranking. Often you will find keywords that are not similar with your blogs but traffic is coming to some similar webpage in your site from those keywords which means those particular keywords have search volume but not enough resources to show, so you can analyze those keywords & consider writing a blog post with those keywords in that exact topic that people are searching & rank that blog to attract more traffic.

Short Blog vs. Long Blog ? Which can fetch more Conversions ?

Most of the people now-a-days prefer short content than longer ones. But if a customer is serious about your product or service & going to spend money in it would likely be first keen to know as much information about it as possible & would prefer long informative content than short content. Most of the people who would prefer short content may not be that serious. As a result, engagements & conversions are likely to be more for long blogs as well as more social shares. Though I don’t recommend filler content to make it longer.

If it feels too complicated or time-consuming, don’t worry. I can help you in creating your Blogging Strategy.

Let’s dive into 2 situations –

Situation 1 – You’re a Digital Marketer & you do a job in an agency & now you want to open a Digital Marketing(DM) Agency yourself. You have a decent professional network but not too many people in the industry knows you. You have to build that agency from scratch. Probably you can ask some people in your network or so to get your first traction & grow.

Situation 2 – You’ve joined a Digital Marketing Agency as an employee. You want to open your own Digital Marketing Agency in future but now you don’t have money or experience either.

You bought domain, hosting & created your website, which is quiet cheap now-a-days. You started creating content about what you’re learning.

You share your content on the online communities DM communities & getting blog visits. You’re also active on those communities & sharing valuable content which others would find useful & answer questions of other members & resolving their issues. People have started noticing you & are tagging you in their query posts because they know you’re the one they can look upto to resolve their issues. You’re providing value through good content & building up trust by resolving their issues. You have became an important member of the group.

You’re guest posting on other blogs that allows to do so & attracting their audiences as well.

You also attend meetups, tradeshows, etc. where you speak about DM & grow your professional network.

You’ve started your podcast where you invite other small digital marketers & interview them.

You also have a Youtube channel where you create videos about DM.

You’ve positioned yourself as a brand & people have become aware of you in the DM space & you’ve a large professional network, built up a decent subscriber base just with the valuable content which you create & share consistently with them.

You have wrote an ebook for which you run campaigns in digital media & give it for free in return of their email adress & convert them to subscribers. You nurture them with your content & continue to provide value to them.

You yourself is a known brand in DM industry now.

Now, you choose to leave your company & start your own DM Agency.

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In Situation 2, Do you think you need to market your agency’s brand from scratch or just shower your personal brand authority to the agency?

Like in Situation 1, If you haven’t built your personal brand & your business fails & you open a new venture even after some time, you’ll have to build your new venture’s brand from scratch.

Whereas if you’ve already built your personal brand, you just need to shower your brand authority to the new venture. You can create multiple brands under your personal brand.

Even if you want to do job, if you’re a brand yourself, you’ll choose which companies to work for, not them, because people wants to work with brands.

People have trust on you, so whenever you launch a new company or product or offer a service, you don’t have to build up trust with them from scratch again, you just need to sprinkle your brand trust.

You’ll have to build your personal brand among people who you intend to do business with.

This is how building your personal brand can help you get a great job or starting a new business.

So, are you going to build your personal brand & how it can help you in your career ? Let me know in the comments below.

When it comes to putting up ads on digital mediums, the two most important platforms to show your ads are on search engine results & social media feeds. Both have their own effectiveness.

Search Engine Ads(Demand fulfillment ads or search ads) only show up when an user searches for a product or services that exists. So, if you put up an ad for some new product or services, it will hardly help as that is likely to be searched by an user. Suppose, your company launches a new service & you put up an ad for that on search engines, but it’s likely to be shown in results since users aren’t aware of your service & likely to search for your service or similar service.

Social Media ads(Demand generation ads or display ads) interrupts what you are checking in your feed with ads, i.e., the ad will be shown to a large number of people even if they have not been looking or searching for it. And that is what is important if you’re introducing a new product or services which don’t have an existing demand & people are not aware of & not looking & searching for it.

Conversion Rates are always higher in search engine ads since users are shown ads about what they are searching or looking for, so they are more likely to click on the ad, unlike in social media where ads may be shown to someone who may not be interested in that product or services.

In a Google ad, you can directly sell your product or services to the customers because when they’re searching for that product or services they’re serious about it & is in a buying mood & are likely to convert. But people come to social media to check updates from their family, friends & various other purposes & not to buy. So, if you try to sell directly to the target audience, they may not convert, as they’re not in a buying mood. So, first provide them with something interesting or free, so that they sign up for that, & later when they get serious & return to engage to that free stuff, you may approach them to buy your product or services. Or you can just try to take your target customers through this funnel –> Create awareness > generate interest > customer considers buying > customers buys > becomes loyal customers > refers to others.

Social Media is however highly recommended for retargeting ads, i.e. when visitors leave without making a purchase, they will be shown your ad in their social media feed multiple times when they are browsing reminding them to complete the purchase repeatedly.

Increase in page loading time can result in user dissatisfaction, reduce visitors to your website, and affects the Search Engine Rankings. You can use Google Pagespeed, Webpagetest.org, Pingdom Website Speed Test, GT Metrix & many other tools available to measure website loading speed. Also, if you are using Chrome browser, visit the website you want to check speed, right click & click on ‘Inspect’, find ‘lighthouse’ option in top & click on ‘Analyze Page Load’.

Here are a few ways on how to increase website loading speed in wordpress :-

Upload images from external library instead of WordPress server: Uploading images from external library instead of wordpress can increase website loading speed as it won’t consume the site’s bandwidth. So, its better to import images from an external media library. You’ll need to optimize your image(WP SmushIt, WP Optimize, etc. plugins) first for that. You can use any CDN plugins available in WordPress or you can use Jetpack Plugin in WordPress which is free & optimizes your images, stores the images in their CDN Network & doesn’t consume your site’s bandwidth. Also it has lazy load feature which load the images as the users scroll down the website.

Upload videos from external library instead of WordPress server: Similarly uploading videos from WordPress server can slow down the page loading speed. You can use external library like Youtube, Vimeo, etc. where you upload the video & just import to your wordpress site. That will consume their bandwidth & not your site’s, so it will not affect your page loading speed & will increase website loading speed.

Reduce HTTP requests: If you’re using Google Chrome, go to the webpage > right click n the page & click on inspect > go to “Network” in menu & you’ll see a list of files to which http request is made to each one. So, the more files, the more requests, & the more time it takes to load your page. In the left bottom corner, it shows the total number of requests. It’s recommended to go through the files & remove if any file is unnecessary to reduce the number of requests.

Minify & Combine files: WP Rocket reduces the weight of your HTML, JavaScript and CSS files through minification. Lighter files means faster load time!

Reducing TTFB: TTFB(Time to first byte) is the time gap between the http request sent to your host server by the user’s browser & getting the first byte of data from the server. You can monitor that with Chrome Developer Tools, on the webpage press Ctrl+Shift+I > Network, you will see the list of files, on the last is the waterfall column. Take the cursor to the waterfall column & it will show the TTFB time of that page. It is usually recommended to keep the TTFB under 200 ms. You can reduce the TTFB time by enabling caching.

Remove cache: Install any cache removal plugin from WordPress to remove the site cache which otherwise can slow down the site. W3 Total Cache or WP Optimize plugins can be used for this purpose.

Don’t use shared Hosting: It may sound like a bargain, but it will slow down your site. It is recommended to take a hosting separately for your site.

Choose Proper Theme: should be lightweight; which have tons of features that you will never use, slowing your site to a crawl. ; more very basic &simple, faster the website. Twenty Nineteen most light theme.

Optimize your Homepage: keep it clean, Show post excerpts, less widgets, remove inactive plugins.

Optimize your Database: Remove unnecessary data to speed up your site . You can use the WP Optimize plugin which cleans your database, compresses your images and caches your site. 

Hotlinking: Hotlinking is displaying an image on a website by linking to the website hosting the image, it consumes the owner website’s bandwhich and slows down the site. Placing .htaccess file in the root prevent visitors from directly linking pictures,

Gravatar Image slows down site loading: To disable Gravatar images, go to WordPress admin dashboard, from “Settings” click on “Discussion“, scroll down and in “Default Avatar“, choose “Blank“. Leaving the image blank will improve site speed.

Remove unnecessary stored draft: Even after a post is published, wordpress stores all the previous drafts which is most of the time not needed & slows down the site. You can use the plugin Revision Control to limit your number of drafts stored.

Minimize the size of your CSS and JS files: Reducing the size of CSS and JS files can increase site load speed. For this purpose, you can use the Autoptimize plugin which can optimize JS, CSS and HTML of your site.

Uninstall unwanted plugins: Too many plugins can slow down site, so its recommended to only keep important plugins & keep as less plugins possible.

Keep less external scripts as much as possible: External scripts contribute to increase your site loading time. Too many external scripts may result in slowing down your site. So, it’s recommended to keep them less as much as possible except only what’s important.

Disable pingbacks and trackbacks: This feature alert you whenever your blog or page receives a link. But it also puts strain on your server affecting the page loading speed. To disable this feature, go to WP-Admin Dasbboard > Settings > Discussion > Default article settings & untick the boxes which you don’t need.