Direct Marketing Strategies for SaaS Vendors

The cloud industry is continuously growing and thriving that software companies find the market appealing and lucrative. With SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) still being one of the dominant cloud platforms there is, cloud adoption has increased in various industries. The IT industry creates and innovate products and services by leveraging on the cloud’s ability to scale and host an array of SaaS applications that are offered to consumers, start-ups and small businesses.
“The Future of Cloud Computing Survey Third Annual Survey 2013,” was recently published by North Bridge Venture Partners and GigaOM Research, which indicated that 63% of 855 respondents (comprising business in various industries, IT decision makers and cloud platform vendors) are using SaaS in their companies.
The growing deployment of SaaS applications provides endless opportunities for software companies to improve the services to meet the growing demands of the clients’ business operations. Moreover, this is an opportune time to strategically promote the products directly to get a share on market. Whether you’re a start-up SaaS vendor, a budding entrepreneur or an established SaaS provider, below are direct marketing strategies you can implement to increase your consumer’s base and clients worldwide:

1. Publish white papers – A rule of thumb in publishing white papers are to provide new perspectives on the industry. Companies publish white papers to explain newly developed technologies as well as to educate people about their products. Generally, white papers should be short, concise and readable. Three to five pages maximum should cover the topic, with a clear synopsis of the paper.
2. Educate through webinars – Webinars allows you to connect and engage current and possible clients. These seminars are conducted over the Internet, using social media, blogs and corporate websites to promote them. Educate your viewers regarding the industry and provide thought-provoking ideas to help them on making decisions in their IT needs. Invite them to register via newsletters, and use a reliable webinar solution such as GoToMeeting for videoconferencing and live chats. Allot a time for Q/A for your viewers and listeners.  
3. Be visible on your blog and other blogs with guest posts – Work with someone, who is an expert in content marketing to help you create optimised and concise contents that can be posted on the corporate blog and to other blogs. Provide interesting topics and ‘how-to tips’ that add value to your product. Pitch in to high traffic blogs for guest posts, but make sure you don’t directly sell the product there. Provide rich, in-depth analysis of the industry and solutions for their IT infrastructure. Your goal must be to educate, share and inform readers, more than selling just a product.
4. Write an e-book – Self-publishing an e-book will create a strong branding on your side. Popular SaaS vendor such as HubSpot is maximising this approach. You will see “Marketing Whitepapers & E-books” constantly on Twitter, which is always promoted as free, and it grabs people’s attention, which leads them to take an action even just by clicking the link.

The statistics prove true that SaaS deployments will experience growth in the coming years. However, whilst the resources to produce software are already available, from cloud servers, hybrid cloud platform to cloud app hosting, the biggest challenge is how to maintain product innovation as the SaaS market gains momentum.

Patrick Li is a tech addict who’s looking at ways to streamline business performance using cloud technology and other new services.

How to Host your Website on Google For Free

Do you know that Royal family of UK has preferred Google as the Hosting contributor for Prince William’s official wedding Website. This site you can view it at officailroyalwedding2001.org which contains the news related to it, updates, photo gallery, videos and the whole thing is hosted to the Google App Engine.

Don’t you find something new in this? Actually Google App Engine has used to host web apps in the cloud that in sense says hosted to Google. And to give you info this is the first time ever that Google infrastructure is being used to host a ‘static Website’. This event will acquire bounty of Press attention and web traffic for the coming days.

Interested to Host Your Own Website at Google App Engine?

Google actually defines that it is a more secured site than any other site. The first and foremost advantage of hosting to your website to Google App Engine is that it provides the more reliable, because it is served by Google’s own data centers.

Next to that if it seems to have low traffic website, you need not have to spend a dollar for web hosting. On posting your image you are provided with 1GB of bandwidth per day. On exceeding that limit you will have to pay-per-use similar to Amazon S3 which charges you for what you use or how much memory space you occupied.

Are you ready to Host?

As usual you can web host to a particular company by rending some storage space on their server. This can let you send or transfer HTML and several files to their server using some link like FTP or cPanel. On completing this process your Website is ready to serve. Google App engine puts effort in similar manner except the file transfer mechanism, because it is bit similar from others a bit.

• Set out to appengine.googel.com and try to generate a new application. If you haven’t used App engine in prior you have to verify using your mobile number on trying to create a new app.

• Now on creating your application a name must be provided. It should be unique from other and you have to name through lowercase alphabets and digits. For instance your app can be identified as “thisismyawesomewebsite”.

• The next two sub-steps involved might be a little bit tougher, but that is not to tough. Just try to download and install two installers in sequence. First file to be installed: install phython form phython.org Next to that: Install App Engine SDK from code.google.com

• Once the downloading process is competed it will be in Zip format, unzip it the file name is wesite.zip in your computer. It will contain some HTML pages, images and CSS that will try to host Google App Engine.

• Now you have to open up app.yaml file with notepad and replace word with ‘labnol’ with the application that has been created.

• You have come to the final step and deploy your website to Google App Engine. Open the Google App engine from the launcher program from the Start Menu.

Hit the Deploy button and you site is ready to host. And deploy once again to insert the edited files.

How to Download Youtube Videos in their Original Format

Youtube videos can sometime be watched at offline mode by using intermediary software; by third party you can download videos form Youtube through a website. So they may not the original resolution. Is this a legal way for viewing a video. The Third Party usually breaks the terms and condition of Youtube. Till date there has been no way to download the Youtube videos in their original format that they have uploaded.

Youtube videos can also be watched offline with some third party software. Websites offers you to download many videos of Youtube, but these are not going to be as the original version of Youtube. But for those who are not willing about quality or resolution you can surely download from the intermediary. Surely this intermediary will crack the terms and conditions of Youtube.

So you may be feed up how to download Original resolution of Youtube. Earlier Youtube allows downloading that to the transformed version of video that you uploaded. That was also allowed only till September 26. That to with some terms and condition only they were allowed to download. They condition was only two videos can be downloaded from the Youtube Channel.

So from your own Youtube channel you can download video in a transformed way through edit button. That is Youtube Video manager will download as individual videos. The format you could download is MP4. MP4 is most easily download able format to get your own videos. Actually this MP4 format is only a legal way of downloading video. Here both offline and online video are available. The limitation given to this is that original 1080p HD version will not be given to download.

At last you have to make yourself happy here is a way to download original version of Youtube videos. This much time we have discussed about how to download in an illegal way, now it is time to go in for a legal way of download.

Download Youtube videos in Original Resolution:

• Do you have account in Google Takeout? If not so create with your present and valid Gmail ID. This is because you have sign in with the same email ID to create Youtube channel.

• Once you have created you will find a TakeOut screen, almost at the bottom of the screen. Thatwill be filled up with red Rectangular “Create Archive” button.

• Next to that Google will create a packed in (.zip). Archive with the videos that you have uploaded in Youtube channel. • On completion of the archive formation with 100%, next step is go to ‘download’ option and get all the files that you required.

• At this stage of downloading you have to make a note that your archived video doesn’t exceed 2GB of data. If so it will by design split up into compactable mode.

Your process is not completely over.This process is going to have a restriction. If you are interested in downloading your high resolution video it is not possible. You will have to download the full archive that is not completely possible. Since the service provided by Google is new, they have to fix this issue in the mere future so that user will able to download the high resolution video.

Hope so you have a clear idea to download Youtube videos in a legal manner.

How to Auto Forward Gmail in Bulk

Have you ever managed email address that forwards incoming mail to other email address. This scenario may exist in office, college and lots more place where you need to share a information in common. Gmail offer you this facility to Auto- Forward your incoming messages to other email address. Initially you have to filter and any message that matches filter will automatically forward to another email address that you have specified.

However there is some restriction involved in Gmail’s Auto Forwarding Facility: 

• You are not allowed to auto-forward old emails. For illustration, you have a cluster of emails and need to forward those to your Evernote account for archiving. You’ll have to manually forward those one by one. This is so because auto forward works only with new incoming emails. So you cannot try it out with older once.

• You are also restricted to auto-forward email other than the filtered once or unverified email address. When you opt for auto-forward facility it initially sends an verification to all the emails you have specified and upon acceptance it will send. You cannot expect to send email to unspecified address.

Gmail’s Auto-forward with Google Docs

Initially we have discusses came to a conclusion that Gmail will forward only to the new email and older emails are hard to perform so. Gmail along with Google Docs provides you services of auto-forwarding in bulk with old emails. Google Docs implements a simple Google Script to overcome this situation.

The method is very simple. Initially you have to set up Google Script that will monitor one or more label in your Gmail in Inbox and when it finds email of this type it will automatically forwards to the specified recipients. You just have to set the script once and it will automatically send it form the next time automatically.

How to set up Email Forwarding in Gmail

• Initially make a copy of Google Sheet in your Google Docs. You will find two columns A and B, fill them with appropriate data. You have to enter a valid Gmail names in A and in B corresponding auto-forward email message to designed email address. This will decide to forward the message. If the enter email Id is not valid then problem going to arise.

• In order to process of message forwarding you have to go in Gmail Forward menu and in Googel Sheet choose the initialize and allowance the script access to your Gmail account.

• Final process has come up and Go to Gmail Forward start genuine launch of Auto-Forward script. Now on closing the Google Docs you may find that it automatically forwards your Gmail message to the particular you have specified.

You may have slight confusion regarding forwarded message was completely processed or not. For that a new label called Forwarded will be indicated to Gmail threat. It describes that the message has been auto forwarded. When you find that this is not necessary you move to Google Sheet and uninstall from the Gmail forward menu.

Everything Just Got Easier With Register.Com Now!

When you're in the process of building your website, chances are all you can think about is launching your site and promoting it. But before you get that far, you need to make sure that your site is ready to be unveiled. You'll want to choose a domain registrar who makes it easy for you to find the domains you want, find similar domains with similar keywords, get them registered and your WHOIS info entered into the database, and then set the nameservers so that your registered domain points to your hosting account (hint: select a hosting company that can handle domain registration for you in order to make this process more efficient). Once your domain is registered and live on your hosting plan, you can utilize these five tips to help you along as you are preparing your website to go live:

Ingrain optimization.

Your website should be optimized for search engines as well as social media networks, and the easiest way to do this is to make optimization an integral part of your website. As you're creating images in your favorite image editor, save them with relevant titles - and then when you embed them within your website, use relevant keywords. All of your code-generated content -- including CSS, HTML, and XHTML -- should be compliant, or as compliant as possible. The more compliant your code, the less likely it is that you'll have an error somewhere within your website - and the more likely it is that search engine bots will have an easier time of navigating your website.

Be consistent with names, logos, and keywords.

Consistency is key to establishing yourself to both your customers and the internet at large. Be consistent with spelling, capitalization, and with the usage of any slogans or logos. 2+ word companies need to be especially meticulous with this, as "Jane's Flower Shop" and "Jane's flower shop" are different, and both customers and search engine bots will pick up on that.

Use an elegant, minimal logo.

When deciding what type of logo to use for your website, keep in mind that less is truly more. Your logo should be smooth and polished, never rough around the edges, and it should be eye-catching. Use smaller versions of this logo for social media profile avatars, so that your look is the same no matter where on the internet you're at.

Streamline your design.

Minimal is key for making the focus of your website be on its content. Similar to how the majority of magazines keep clutter away from content and margins, you'll want to keep to a simple header, navigation area, and sidebar, and leave the rest of the page free for your content.

Outsource when necessary.

If there's something you'd really like to have done to your website, but you don't have the time or the technical knowledge to get it done yourself, then outsource. Don't settle for an alternative design or a bandaged repair on poor code. Outsource your needs so that the job gets done correctly and professionally.