2 days back , i received a call from a girl , who introduced herself as from Yahoo India. Almost before i slapped down the phone, as I was almost fed up with tele-callers from various credit card companies and financial institutions, i heard the name Yahoo luckily . I have never worked in the tele-calling department / industry, but most of the tele callers i have faced never do any level of necessary homework . I understand that most times that is not a possibility, for all i know, these people may get paid by the number of persons called up and not by the numbers of accounts bagged . But in my opinion it would go a long way making the sale …. at least to know the business of the person they call up.
In this case, the girl did not even know that I am into web development , even though she knew the name of my company’s website , which is “websys.co.in” . Nevertheless , she was quite bent on explaining me all about PPC , Yahoo and similar topics, which i did not have any interest of hearing. I was already ready to take the account, as I was also reading about the same topic on Sitepoint’s Search Engine Marketing Kit . Anyway , finally she gave the phone to her senior .
Her senior was little more to the point , and was able to help me sign up quite quickly and activate my account , setup a first campaign , add keyword to it etc. I now have 2 ads running . but here comes the not-so-happy part .
Yahoo Search Marketing India , probably because it is newer than its parent , left much to be desired. It does not even have half the options I was reading about , which is obvious from just by looking at the FAQ , which I should have earlier – feature wise, the “Senior” person who was helping me was not even fully knowledgeable about his own product . I had asked him ” Ok, thanks so I now have my Ad running on your network but what is my reach … is it on Yahoo or Yahoo India ” and the guy went like ” Don’t worry , your ad is now running on Yahoo.com, MSN.com , and various of our other partners because you used “Content Match , Advance Match” etc . But i was little uncertain , so I asked him to run a search for web hosting , on both Search.Yahoo.co.in and Search.Yahoo.com, which demonstrated totally different ads on the sponsored listings box. So the guy then requested to call me back with more info , which he did within 15 minutes and confirmed my fear . Well , I wont say fear as I didn’t really expect to pay a 0.50 p CPC and get my ad on top at Yahoo.com or MSN.com lol . But , just so you know , Yahoo Search Marketing does have partners like MSN , but it is Msn.co.in and similar .
When the person was also demonstrating me the Keyword Selector Tool i had queried whether i can save my current searches – online or download for analysis / future – i also had a extremely difficult time explaining what i was trying to do , and “WHY – i would need to do that ”
Nevertheless, i am currently receiving daily reports of my first paid campaign , at a very low cost and I was able to learn / gather / answer some of my own queries, so overall i would say i am somewhat satisfied . What remains to be seen is what this experimental project goes , and then i will venture to bigger pond of international Search Engine Marketing .

Following the lead of google , MSN / Live now has a webmaster central . If you have been a webmaster for the past 2-3 years , you would be finding it very limited as compared to google webmaster central, but it is surely looking similar – with options to submit your xml sitemap , robots.txt checker for your domain etc.
It does require a existing LIVE account …. but not necessarily a Hotmail account . I login to MSN Messenger using my work email id , which i had long back associated using passport , so i could easily use the same here as well.
It does require you to have an XML sitemap for your website , which should be created using the same sitemaps protocol as google and yahoo. Once you do so , it shows your websites listed pages and links, provided you already have been indexed . If not , this would help them follow up your website at some point of time. Going by the way LIVE / MSN is trying to improve , this will surely help i can safely say .
However , in my experience i found their options too limited , as i said before … as well their results also pretty poor . It gives you results on which of your websites pages are ranking good and for which terms , but if you try to check back on it , it is no where the same.
Some people probably has termed it as another pagerank , but MSN has coined it as Domain Rank.
Sign up at this link : http://webmaster.live.com/

OK , I have been thinking about this for some time and holding this off for some time , but now I am almost certain that i will sell these domain names. The domain names are nice names in my idea ( the buyer will decide best ) , have keywords as well as dictionary words, india in them and some variants.
I have also put them on Sedo , to get some earnings from them while the domains are put up for sale .

The domains are :

• indianhost.net
• sareez.com
• smoothies.in
• frutz.in
• eathealthy.in
• easycompare.in
• indiamoneymarket.in
• healthyeating.in
• indianmoneymarket.co.in
• easycompare.co.in
• froothies.in
• froosh.in

If you are interested , post a comment here with your proper email id . You can check the prices i have in mind for starters on Sedo.com

We have just started creating a custom template for wordpress for a client . The wordpress work involves creating his blog theme to suit and complement his existing website and website design. This is something i have mentioned before that many customers / blog owners will require their blog to look as close to their existing website as they would want their website visitors to feel that they are still on the same website.
The work also includes installing various wordpress plugins , primarily social bookmarking icons, tags and digg and stumbleupon extensions. I wish it would have also included logo design as well , as the logo the customer has looks pretty old and outdated and out of place both on his website as well on the blog header. But as of yet , he is quite adamant that he will keep that logo.
The social bookmarking this is a weird craze and some people have become too impressed with it . I agree it is a very essential plugin for sites as well as blogs , but in this particular case, the client has requested to insert the bookmark icons in the top and bottom of every post along with a additional Digg and Stumbleupon option just under it … which is surely a overkill … the visitor , who was early frustrated by excess Ads on the websites, will not get overwhelmed with these bunch of “social bookmarks” and would easily miss the main content IMO :p

Yesterday around almost 10:36 in the night i received a certain email from a reputed organization, which I had myself applied to. This would be something i will thoroughly enjoy, as i have my personal agenda in mind for the job.
Like the many jobs in today’s world , this one also does not have any targets set by my superiors yet allows one to learn a great deal just by participation itself. Even though I consider myself to be quite good in English , I expect this to better it by one more level. It is an honor to be a part of The Internet and this certainly is one of its building blocks .