Pros and Cons of Outsourcing When Starting a Business

Some of the current popular advice for would be entrepreneurs says that outsourcing everything but your core operations is the best and easiest route to business ownership. Like most other advice, this idea comes with its own set of pros and cons. Before you take the leap into outsourcing, be sure to understand exactly what it really means to you and your business.

Outsourcing Pros

Outsourcing non-core competencies does have its advantages. If you do not have to spend your time handling the accounting or managing your website, your full time and attention can be on the actual operations of your startup. If you are lucky, the professionals you outsource to will work hard for your business and help you grow. Outsourcing can be a valuable money-saving alternative to hiring and dealing with staff, and can provide an alternative perspective on what and how your business is doing.

Outsourcing Cons

The downside of outsourcing revolves around one critical point - abdicating control of your business. One of the significant advantages of entrepreneurship is taking control and responsibility for your own work life. Often, business owners hand off a task to an outsource professional and trust them implicitly to do the right thing. But every business includes nuances and details that need to be addressed through every aspect, and it is unrealistic to expect every outsource professional to know and understand those specifics on their own. In addition, without taking a proactive position in monitoring outsourced tasks, you can easily become a target for unscrupulous practices - overcharges, underperformance, even theft.

What to Do?

Clearly, entrepreneurs need a way to enjoy the advantages of outsourcing non-core tasks while avoiding the potential problems. The first step is to check your attitude - be sure you are looking at outsourcing as a supporting role in your business. That is, you must maintain a sense of responsibility and the control of a manager over the work that you pass off to others. This means that you need to understand the fundamentals of every business task and how it relates to and affects your business before you outsource. You need to identify precisely what it is you want the outsource professional to handle and a method for evaluating their performance. You need to work closely with the outsourcer to develop useful reporting procedures so that you can keep up with what they are doing, and when and how it is getting done.

The fundamentals of entrepreneurship require more than a passing familiarity with business basics. Whatever your particular operations, you are ultimately in the business of business and, as the owner, you are ultimately responsible for everything that occurs in the name of your venture. Making a choice to hand off core business tasks without thoroughly understanding the purpose, procedures, and impact is a critical but common error among new business owners.

www.made-from-india.com which provide the outsourcing services.Thanks to the low costs incurred by hiring Indian professionals, more and more overseas companies are outsourcing their b2b solutions to Indian companies. Nobody pays money for nothing and there is no doubt about the educational qualities of the people employed by Indian outsourcing companies. The equation is very simple. Most of the foreign companies, with a few exceptions, do not charge their clients for online help. By outsourcing these technological calls to India, they save a good amount of money. The Indian Outsourcing Companies generally enter into a deal with these foreign companies for a pre-determined time period.

Going out on your own provides a freedom and autonomy that just isn't found by working for someone else. Your success rises and falls on your own actions -- a reality that is motivating for some and overwhelming for others. By taking the time to hone your fundamental business skills before you launch, you can make informed choices about what tasks you outsource and to whom. You will still be responsible for the outcome, but you will also have the knowledge and skills to maintain control over the work product of everyone involved in your venture...even outsourced professionals.

Keyword Research Basics For SEO

I've said it before and I'll say it again … there is no more important step in the SEO process than keyword research. One could make a compelling argument for link building or for architecture or for copywriting but at the end of the day – ranking highly for keywords that either don't convert or which you close up shop waiting to rank for isn't going to help too terribly much so in my opinion – I'd put keyword research higher in importance. In fact, when I'm building affiliate sites my first step is to look up keywords and competition levels – then I look into products and websites and this method has worked very well indeed. It insures that I choose keywords that with both convert and that I can rank for in a period of time and with an effort level that matches the return.

So – if you're doing keyword research, where should you begin? Unless you're an affiliate marketer you already have a product and since you're the target audience of this article – I'm going to assume that's the case. For the purpose of this article I'm going to pick a hobby of mine and also an area where I don't have a client and imagine I'm doing keyword research for the imaginary online downhill mountain biking store DH Mountain Bikes.

So Where To Begin ...

The first thing one needs to do is try to think up all the possible phrases that might apply. I call this my seed list … it's the list of phrases that my research starts with and is generally based on brainstorming. In this case the list would be:

• downhill mountain bike
• dh mountain bike
• mountain bike

The keyword tool I generally use first is Google's keyword suggestion tool. There are other great tools but I've found Google's tool to be as accurate as any other, the price is definitely right (free), and they're very good about providing the information required to know just how wrong the data is if you know where to look. So let's do just that.

Before we begin you'll need to head over to Google's keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. In the top left (for now) you'll see a link to a beta version of the tool. Click on the link and you'll be at the new version of the tool which will provide you easy access to much more information – as long as you know what to look for. So let's begin with our three seed phrases.

When you see the list you'll first have to know what the numbers are. This tool is a tool designed for AdWords and the default number is the Broad match which means it includes every phrase with the term. For example, the term “mountain bike” has a broad match total of 2,740,000 which will include “downhill mountain bike”, “mountain bike parts”, “kona mountain bike”, etc. etc. What we want to know is how many searches are for “mountain bike”. Down the left-hand side you'll see a set of check boxes. Deselect “Broad” and select “Exact” and you'll get the Exact match numbers – the number of searches for the exact phrase. You'll quickly see that 2,740,000 drop to 450,000. This is how many people searched the GOOGLE SEARCH NETWORK for “mountain bike”. Why is this in caps – because it's so commonly misunderstood that I definitely want your attention brought to it. This isn't the number of searches on Google.com – it's the number of searches on all sites who's search is powered by Google. From YouTube to Beanstalk's blog search – it's all in there so the data starts to get skewed from the start. Then let's add in all the automated queries from rank-checking tools and just manual searches from you and your competitors and the data gets further skewed. This skewing will exist in all data – the thing I like about using Google is that at least we know more about what's adjusting the data.

OK – so from there we need to organize the data into a more useful set of information. To do this one needs to understand the columns of data. The first column is the keyword, the second you'll see is a link to the term on Google Insights. We'll get into this later. The next is Global Monthly Searches – this is the average number of searches/mth worldwide. This can be helpful in some industries but in ours – I'm only concerned with the US market which is where my imaginary store ships to so I'm more interested in the next column Local Monthly Searches which is the number of searches in the US (or whatever region I've specified when entering my keyword phrases). This is the data I'm interested in. The last column is the search trend. This is extremely important but often overlooked. It is a column that wasn't visible by default in the old/current version.

OK – let's organize our data by search volume. Click on the “Local Monthly Searches” and you'll see the keywords order by descending search volume. With this data in front of me I then typically look over to the Trend data to see what I can find there. In our case we're going to see an increase in search volume in the spring and summer. This make sense of course. Think of your industry and see if the trends reflect what makes sense.

I'm also looking for anomalies. Often I'll see phrases that jump for a single month. One has to know that unless there was a news story or other event that would spark interest in a single term or brand – a tool or some other such incident is likely falsifying the data. You need to look at these trends and see if they make sense. If not – you need to either test the phrases with PPC or just skip over them and select different phrases. There's little worse as an SEO than focusing energies on a phrase only to find that the search volume is not what was expected based on the estimates delivered.

So now what?

So what do you do once you've filtered your data down to just what you're interested in looking into competition levels on. Well – the first thing I do is to look to the trends to see if there are any phrases that obviously need to be filtered out. In this case there really aren't any high in the search volume column. So the only thing left is to look at the competition levels to see what makes sense. For our purposes we'll be dividing the list and research into two categories:

Major phrases – We need to decide what the long-term goals are going to be and the targets for the main pages. These will be the totally generic phrases such as “mountain bike” and “downhill mountain bike” as well as brand or type specific phrases such as “specialized mountain bike” and “full suspension mountain bike”.

Longtail phrases – We also need to look into the types of longtail phrases we're going to want to target. In this case I know I'll want to target specific parts which will require new research. I will spare you the details there but I'll end up with specific models of components such as “hayes mx2”. You don't need to know what that is – you need to know the makes and models in your industry (or other longatil opportunities such as “new york hotel with jacuzzi”, etc.)

I generally would gather together a list of 15 or 20 major phrases and 50 or 60 longtail phrases and would then head into the competition analysis to determine which phrases to move forward with.

Changes to Skilled Occupations List Benefit Australian IT Industry!

Many Australian industry bodies are all praise about the recent changes to the country’s skilled occupations list. Many think that the new list would permit more IT professionals to enter Australia in the coming times. The changes will definitely be instrumental in meeting the skills shortage in many industries, especially IT that they have been facing. These changes are likely to be in force since July.

The changes are an attempt to revive the harmony of the skilled migration program of Australia, said the country’s immigration minister. The difference between the previous and the latest skilled occupation list is that in the former the job titles were very specific, whereas the job titles in the new list are more generic. The bottom-line is that the latest skilled occupations list provides flexibility to both migrants and employers.

The Australian Information Industry Association’s chairman appreciated the changes to the occupations list for the skilled professionals, saying that the jobs in the new list are simplified, as compared to the earlier one. He acknowledged that the changes would not only have an impact on the number of people coming to Australia, it also gives employers the ability to typify their needs in terms of skills.

Being one of the biggest users of the Australian migration program, IT industry will be benefited from the changes significantly. The changes are a solution to the industry’s current skills shortage. As the head of the Australian Computer Society said, the new skilled occupations list would be instrumental in attracting overseas workers under the skilled visa categories, thereby making the workforce stronger!

Google Releases Playable PAC-MAN Doodle

Google has released a really cool playable doodle of PAC-MAN to celebrate the game's 30th birthday.

The Google Blog offers all the fun details. "Today, on PAC-MAN's 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories-or meet PAC-MAN for the first time-through our first-ever playable Google doodle. To play the game, go to google.com during the next 48 hours (because it's too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the 'Insert Coin' button or just wait for a few seconds."

Google says it has included all the original sounds and graphics of the original PAC-MAN along with an easter egg for Ms. PAC-MAN.

"We also added a little easter egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. PAC-MAN joins the party and you can play together with someone else (PAC-MAN is controlled with arrow keys or by clicking on the maze, Ms. PAC-MAN using the WASD keys)."

Google Launches Encrypted Search Option

Just in time for the weekend and hours-long browsing sessions at home computers, Google's given privacy advocates a gift. This afternoon, the search giant released the encrypted version of Google Search it mentioned after admitting to collecting sensitive data sent over Wi-Fi networks.

A post on the Official Google Blog shared all of the relevant details. Interestingly, the post was written by Evan Roseman, a software engineer, rather than Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, or perhaps Marissa Mayer or even Eric Schmidt.

Still, Roseman explained, "When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network. The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you're searching using SSL and that you may encounter a somewhat different Google search experience . . ."

Later, Roseman added, "Today's release comes with a 'beta' label for a few reasons. First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product. To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won't see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don't support SSL at this time. Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience."

It seems possible that this development will leave Bing and Yahoo looking unsafe to some users. Let us know in the comments section what you make of the encrypted search option, and perhaps (since Google probably won't share much data) some polls and surveys can sort out other people's opinions next week.

Article Writing & Content Writing Guide

If you have ever heard anything about Internet or online marketing, you probably have heard the phrase, “Content is King”. This refers to the content of a website, which makes it much more accessible to visitors based on relevancy and subject matter crawled by the Internet browsers. Because so much emphasis is placed on the content of a website, an entire branch of writing has developed known as content writing. Content writing is a specialized style of writing, which differs slightly from journalistic styles.

There are many different types of people and businesses that use content writing. Most of which are webmasters, however many are also marketing professionals who understand the world of search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine optimization is a marketing method to make a website much more accessible to prospective visitors through the use of search engines. The more optimized a website is for the search engines, the higher it will appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The better and more relevant the content on a site is, the better the rank it will have.

Content writing includes a number of variants including not only SEO writing and SEO copywriting, website writing, blogging, sale documents, press release writing, e-books, e-catalogs, and many other forms which appear on the Internet. Content writing is basically anything that is intended to be read on the Internet or sent across the World Wide Web. The body of any article or piece that a content writer generates should be clear, concise, and easy to read quickly. Most content articles are relatively short works, usually ranging from 100 to 500 words although it really just depends on the topic and the particular website.

A good content writer should be able to convey information, thoughts, and instructions in short, structured sentences. The words and paragraph organization to the content writing should always be written so that anyone can understand it, as website visitors will range greatly in levels of intelligence, patience, and education. Because of the wide audience content writers target, the way in which content articles are written is different than for print. Some basic differences include the use of simple words, one idea per paragraph, inverted pyramid style with the conclusion or most important point first, and bulleted lists to name a few.

With so many differences going on between content writing and writing for print, it is actually difficult to find good quality content writers. We must remember that while it is important to have a sufficient amount of relevant content on a website, it must also be well written. While there is no shortage of available freelance writers out there, many of them still have not been able to successfully transition to content writing while others just do not have a good grasp on the English language. A growing problem is that many writers claim to speak (and write) English well, but actually have no handle on the language whatsoever.

When hiring a content writer for a website, a hiring webmaster or company should always request a writing sample – or several to get an idea of the writer’s style, abilities, grasp on the language, and range. During the interview process, it is even wise to ask the writer to do a test or sample article so that you can gauge his or her writing styles, turnaround time, and your working relationship.

Faster checker on the internet redesk.com

The Internet is the world's largest library containing millions of books, artifacts, images, documents, maps, etc. There is but one small problem in this library: everything is scattered about on the floor, with growing hordes of confused and bewildered users frantically shifting through the maze, occasionally crying out, "Great Scott, look at what I just found!"

Enter refdesk.

By trade I am a Family Therapist, a clinically trained, MSW social worker. I am the first born - three months before Pearl Harbor - child of a librarian who probably knew the Dewey Decimal Classification before I knew how to walk :-). My mind likes to create and maintain order. In June 1995, I began refdesk in an attempt to bring some semblance of order to the chaos of the Internet. Somewhere along the way, refdesk became my passion, my source of bliss. I took Joseph Campbell's advice and followed my bliss. Amazing adventures have ensued, along with meeting hundreds of people world wide. Such is the nature of the Internet. We are next door neighbors, you and I. My son, Matthew, is editor of the successful Drudge Report. Matt calls himself a "Citizen Reporter," and his work has come to symbolize First Amendment issues on the Net.

Refdesk has three goals: (1) fast access, (2) intuitive and easy navigation and (3) comprehensive content, rationally indexed. The prevailing philosophy here is: simplicity. "Simplicity is the natural result of profound thought." And, very difficult to achieve.

For an overview of refdesk's content and organization, start with Welcome to Refdesk and Site Map.

Outsourcing - The Unique Way to Gain Business Momentum

Today, offshore business process outsourcing has emerged as a happening trend. It refers to the process of getting a job done from another agency, which is generally known as offshore outsourcing service provider. Earlier, the concept of process outsourcing wasn't well recognized by all. But slowly this trend started gaining momentum taking the shape of an industry in certain countries.

Business process outsourcing has become the highly recognizable phenomenon. At the initial stage, small and low grade jobs were outsourced from the United States. Currently, some of the most critical jobs like customer care, IT services and solutions, web design and development services, graphic designing services and others are being outsourced. In fact, every possible business processes are being outsourced these days.

Jobs being outsourced are usually those which need to be done on a daily basis. Today the BPO buyer companies are not doing any tasks on their own. They hire consultant companies to impart training to their new recruits. Even the job of carrying out advertisements is being outsourced from an offshore process outsourcing company.

Outsourcing of business processes has become the most preferred strategy for conducting international businesses of today. It is even considered to be the perfect tool for conducting business activities during the period of economic slowdown. Recession is such a situation when the chances of earning sufficient revenue dwindle dramatically. So it becomes very important to cut down costs and save as much money as possible. Here outsourcing stands as the only means to overcome such horrific situation.

Business process outsourcing offers numerous advantages to the overseas corporations. First of all, it enables the foreign companies to lay focus on their core business processes. There are certain non core processes that can even eat up valuable resources and time and this forms to be a major reason why the overseas clients have now decided to outsource their non core processes from a third party firm or consultancy located in third world countries such as China and India.

Companies that are based in Europe or United States can enjoy huge cost benefit from outsourcing their non core jobs from countries like India, China and Philippines. There is no shortage of skilled and cheap manpower in these countries. Despite the fact that they charge much less for their service India, Philippines are known to maintain quality output as per the international standards. This is a major reason why the phenomenon of outsourcing has become famous in these days.

Most of the foreign companies, with a few exceptions, do not charge their clients for online help. By outsourcing these technological calls to India, they save a good amount of money. The Indian Outsourcing Companies generally enter into a deal with these foreign companies for a pre-determined time period and hire people to outsource solutions from India.

Today's BPO firms are offering variety of offshore outsourcing services such as software development services, Telecommunications, IT, insurance, accounting and finance. At present, every possible processes of a business are being outsourced. The sheer joy of getting high work at lower cost drives the overseas corporations to look for more BPO partners in the third world countries. Some of the corporations have even decided to set up their own center in countries offering outsourcing services since this concept has impressed them a lot. It seems clear that the outsourcing industry is growing at a rapid pace and shows enough potential to bloom in future as well.

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

About

Facebook is a great service. I have a profile, and so does nearly everyone I know under the age of 60.

However, Facebook hasn't always managed its users' data well. In the beginning, it restricted the visibility of a user's personal information to just their friends and their "network" (college or school). Over the past couple of years, the default privacy settings for a Facebook user's personal information have become more and more permissive. They've also changed how your personal information is classified several times, sometimes in a manner that has been confusing for their users. This has largely been part of Facebook's effort to correlate, publish, and monetize their social graph: a massive database of entities and links that covers everything from where you live to the movies you like and the people you trust.

This blog post by Kurt Opsahl at the the EFF gives a brief timeline of Facebook's Terms of Service changes through April of 2010. It's a great overview, but I was a little disappointed it wasn't an actual timeline: hence my initial inspiration for this infographic.

Data

The data for this chart was derived from my interpretation of the Facebook Terms of Service over the years, along with my personal memories of the default privacy settings for different classes of personal data. The population sizes are statistics from Google, the Facebook Data Team, and wild guesses based on what seemed reasonable to me.

I welcome data corrections, so please leave a comment below if you have better numbers to share.

Types of Personal Data

Facebook's classification system for personal data has changed significantly over the years. I tried to capture what I thought were broad topics that have remained relatively consistent. But they might need some explanation.

* Likes: a person, band, movie, web page, or any other entity represented in Facebook's social graph that has a "like" button. "Likes" started with status updates, but have now grown to encompass pretty much everything. In Facebook Newspeak, they're a "Connection".
* Name, Picture: self-explanatory
* Demographics: Your age, sex, birthday, and other basics
* Extended Profile Data: Your family members, city, place of birth, religious views, favorite authors, schools attended -- anything that is an entity you can list a relationship to in your profile.
* Friends: The people you've friended
* Networks: The personal networks you've set up on Facebook (e.g. colleges & universities or companies).
* Wall posts & Photos: Self-explanatory.

Audiences

Audience sizes are based on averages and my own extrapolations from those averages.

The meaning of "network" has changed a lot on Facebook. For this infographic, I've interpreted to be an average network size, plus (later in the timeline) all "friends of friends"
Implementation

The audience scale is logarithmic, so that we can compare audience sizes of 100 and 1 billion. I also did a big no-no and mapped the audience size to the length of the slice, not its area. I don't feel too terrible about this, because the area comparison is already distorted by the log scale. Plus, frankly, the linear scale just looks better.

I built this sketch using Processing.js. You're welcome to download the source. Sorry, no Internet Explorer.

More info:- http://webdesign.made-from-india.com/

Add SocialBookmarks in your Wordpress Theme

In this short tutorial, we’ll be adding buttons to our WordPress theme to allow visitors to easily submit the current article to social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter and Facebook.

All of these sites provide a simple way to create these buttons. For example, to add an article to Reddit, the URL is: http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=THE-URL&title=THE-TITLE. As you can see, we just have to fill in the URL and the title for the submission.

More info: - http://webdevelopment.made-from-india.com/