Saturday, November 1, 2014
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Advertising Platforms - 500GAG.com
Discover the potential in SHOM Tek’s Advertising Platform – 500GAG.com
500GAG.com is an exciting and new entertainment website for mainly Albanian audiences offering humor through user generated posts in picture format, GIF or video. Our goal is simple: to put a smile in every visitor that stumbles upon the unique content at 500GAG.com with global as well as local stories, as they interact by liking, upvoting or commenting on their favorite posts.
Advertising Platforms - 500GAG.com
Friday, August 8, 2014
500GAG.com
500GAG.com is the newest social media platform for Albanian users filled with humor and interesting pics and MEME from around the world. Users can log-in, post, comment and share the posts they find most interesting. 500GAG.com was published in July 2014 and has already attracted over 3 Million visitors a month with more than 100 posts per day. This platform is in line with SHOM Tek’s Advertising Network development plans. It will soon be joined by other high-performing websites offering premium advertising space.
500GAG.com
Friday, June 6, 2014
Services
Check our services and learn more about everything we can do for your site.
Since 2006, SHOM Tek has provided online marketing services to various companies worldwide. During these years we have relied on our professionalized and have increasingly grown to become a company that offers all online marketing services, optimization for search engines (SEO), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Content Marketing, Content Development, Link development, websites design and development, mobile apps, Mobile websites. All work performed by SHOM Tec is protected from our Hacktive Security specialists.
Services
Thursday, June 5, 2014
About SHOM Tek
W
e work hard with every project we are given from our clients, but above all we believe that what makes us successful is our love and passion for our work. SHOM Tek is a company created by three professional techies working in different areas of online and traditional marketing, bringing the best of both worlds. SHOM Tek helps the industry develop further thanks to new practices and ongoing experiences in the market.We are proud of our work and assessments received not only from our customers but also clients of customers who have appreciated the websites that SHOM Tek has built, which are informative and easily navigable. Considering the frequent and endless changes occurring in the search engines such as Google which in one year alone changes its algorithms approximately 50,000 per year, it is necessary that for your success online you will need a company that knows and follows these changes step by step and uses them for the success and the advantage for customers.
At SHOM Tek – We know what is best for your online success.
Services
Since 2006, SHOM Tek has provided online marketing services to various companies worldwide. During these years we have relied on our professional knowledge, have been willing to learn and improve and have enjoyed growing to become a company that offers extensive online marketing services, optimization for search engines (SEO), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Content Marketing, Content Development, Link development, websites design and development, mobile apps, Mobile websites. All work performed by SHOM Tek is protected from our Hacktive Security specialists.
It will be hard to find a company like ours with a dynamic staff and who works in full efficiency in using their full talents. We do our best for your company and allow it to access every opportunity.
- Eduart Milushi, Founder & CEO of SHOM Tek
About SHOM Tek
Joomla & Wordpress
Powerful tools to manage a website.
Joomla and WordPress are as simple to use as they may be difficult. Many users who use Joomla or WordPress are faced with different problems they can’t solve on their own. SHOM Tek’s staff is specialized and very familiar with Joomla and WordPress and so there are no problems for us but only solutions. We’ve been working on these platforms for years and we have gained detailed experiences. Make your life easier with SHOM Tek’s services!
Joomla & Wordpress
Content Creation Services
Appropriate balance between SEO and your company’s description.
Having a solid SEO content development strategy is the essence of each site. Creating quality content for a website should be based on deep and proper research and copy and writing with full commitment. Effective content creation from SHOM Tek staff involves keeping the copy short and simple with clear and easy access. We value consistent SEO content when it is of highest caliber because it is the best way to cultivate visibility and longevity online.
Content Creation Services
Social Media Marketing
Reach everyone that lives online, anywhere in the world.
Social media, and of course, social media optimization is a very powerful tool for any online marketing campaign important to any company. An efficient strategy in social media will not only help your company to establish a close relation with your customers, but will also give you the added benefits found in SEO strategies and help in online rankings.
Social Media Marketing
Online Reputation Management
Because your good name is everything.
Online reputation management is and should be a very important goal and good business practice for any owner of a business and brand. In fact, what others say about your brand, products, services or the behavior of your staff may cost you more money and eventually may cause you to loose money. Those individuals who are concerned about their image always take in consideration reputation management service. SHOM Tek has the resources and know-how and will help you to protect your company’s public image online through Online Reputation Management. We offer reports and Internet reputation management services in accordance with industry standards and your needs.
Online Reputation Management
SHOM Pay Per Click (PPC)
A successful PPC campaign is worth the cost.
Each PPC (Pay per Click) campaign requires continuous surveying and careful management in order to have satisfactory returns on investment (ROI). In SHOM Tek you will have the opportunity to decide how you want to invest and we will guide you for the best investment you can make through our PPC service. You will always get an affordable price for a professional Pay Per Click campaign.
SHOM Pay Per Click (PPC)
Analytics and Reporting
Analytics and Reporting for your online business
SHOM Tek’s staff meet all the requirements to qualify as Google Analysts and some of us volunteer to check the online reputation, use and value of thousand of websites a month on behalf of Google Search. We help our customers in organizing the effective use of marketing campaigns and understand analytical techniques and SEO results.
These kind of platforms and analytical techniques help us to appreciate a variety of online marketing indicators, ranging from SEO, paid search, design, social networking, mobile marketing, reputation management and email marketing.
In order to determine the true value of your money for online marketing it is important to consider several factors when we offer an analysis. For example, which element of the marketing campaigns are used by more consumers and which of them is dictating behavior. We can establish best marketing channels on new analytical methods and predict potential ROI and create strategies that maximize traffic and increase sales.
Besides presenting comprehensive reports, SHOM Tek analysis reports are always ongoing in order to offer our customers and partners proactive advice about future marketing initiatives. To be part of our analytical services and of our periodic reports on the industry in which your company operate do not hesitate to contact us.
Analytics and Reporting
Link Develompent
Increased brand popularity and promote product and service.
Link Development, links from other websites that drive traffic to your website is the difference between success and failure online. Link Building is among the first steps in SEO (search engine optimization) and the most important work which requires an intensive and challenging work. Thanks to our experience we have managed to master the art of Link Development and use it very well.
Link Develompent
Website Design
Learn more about everything else we can do for your site.
Choosing the right company to build your website has an enormous impact on the success of your plans. SHOM Tek’s mission is to build websites with high visibility in order to improve your company’s image and positively affect its revenues. Of course we are designer but we are also Search Engine Optimizers. We can help you with Social Marketing on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter or lunch a campaign to reach your target audience.
Website Design
Saturday, May 31, 2014
Why Product & Marketing MUST Be One Team
How many times have you researched the competition only to discover that a huge driver for their marketing is their awesome product? It’s happened to me more times than I can count.
The fundamental lesson to take away from this is that you must integrate the product and marketing teams. There are many reasons to do so, including:
- What we saw in part 1 of this series, namely that Facebook is becoming a search engine for personal, trusted recommendations. By integrating product and marketing, you maximize the amount and enthusiasm of the word of mouth referrals you get.
- Both product and marketing are based on the same input - the question, “what do customers need?” – so you combine the R&D with marketing to provide the most efficient and effective ouput – your answer in the form of product and marketing).
- If you don’t combine the two, you’re likely to end up contradictory messages such as where the sales team promises more than the product can deliver. You then overpromise and under-deliver, a highly recommended way to ruin your reputation and avoid repeat sales.
- Getting more sales, because the marketing team understands the customer’s perspective as well as the product developers. This results in better copy, hero images and conversion rates. If you’re relying on a sales force, this still holds true as the ability to see the lead’s perspective enables the salesperson to offer more relatable benefits and case studies.
For the purposes of this article, the product team is what others call the operations team, a more common name in service industries like hospitality or telecoms. The product team also includes customer service and support, since these are obviously part of how your customer experiences the product/service your company offer. So too any other team that affects the customer experience – they also need to be integrated into one with the marketing team.
Here are some examples of cases where product has driven marketing… and vice versa.
- An IMN client’s competitors were increasingly selling the digital form of the product, while the analog form was fighting super-cheap competitors. (I hope to write a post about this “Chinafication” of our product and service marketplaces in the future, addressing the result of these dramatically cheaper (in price and quality) goods and services that have invaded our markets.) We could give all the link building and SEO advice in the world, but if this client doesn’t evolve their product line, their business will eventually shrink painfully due to loss of market share and margin. We told them as much. (In fact, I could list this point twice since very similar patterns happened in two disparate markets.)
- Another IMN client had pages for products he no longer carried because they were discontinued by the manufacturer, a risk from the perspective of Google’s quality-user-experience algorithms. Again, the solution involved changes to the product line that dovetailed with changes to the site and business operations/strategy.
- One of my very first clients in SEO was a hotel. They had some negative reviews online to do with maintenance problems. I informed them of that and they said the problem was fixed, so I was able to respond accordingly online. Conversely, this hotel’s great customer service and location (the product, i.e. unique value proposition) earned it links from people who had visited in the past.
- Toy commercials are a primary market research tool for toy makers (pic via Youtube)A company selling their own SAAS for IT was competing against a company that offered a free SAAS. (The latter company sold services, integration, support and consulting around their product.) Guess who had gotten radically better links in huge numbers? The free SAAS company had links from some of the biggest tech sites and brands in the world, such as Mozilla.
- Mobile apps obviously require mobile marketing.
- Seth Godin, in his book Meatball Sundae, cites the toy industry as having a big conference in February to watch ads for new toys. The toys with the most compelling ads are the toys that then get made and sold at Christmas.
- Tim Ferriss’ book The Four Hour Workweek also advises trying to sell your product first, and only creating it if the sales effort succeeds. This is a rapid way to validate/invalidate unique value propositions as well as angles of framing it. Note that doing this for a brand new category of product is very risky, because you may develop a solution to a problem that no one has (or you may not know who has the problem, nor find out before you go bankrupt). This approach works best for industries where an existing demand exists and the new product is more of an iteration on previous toys than something completely new in itself. E.g. Tickle Me Elmo is an iteration on teddy bears… not so risky.
- In the book The Knack, by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham, there’s a case cited of a fishmonger who explains that he’s really in the lending business. He extends credit to restaurants in the form of fish, and gets paid when they have better weeks/it’s high season. Fish on credit is a fundamentally different product (including different pricing) than fish paid for immediately.
- A friend of mine selling a high-priced, high-quality product to SMBs similarly realized that allowing them to pay in installements was the key to unlocking their purses. He’s also making in-kind loans, combining sales technique (overcoming price objection) with product development (he’s selling them product on credit, like the fishmonger).
- In an IMN competitive analysis, we found that some competitors had a key advantage in that they gave customers more information. This greater empowerment was a very unique selling point, attracting both customers and press … we encouraged our customer to replicate and improve on this information sharing.
- A linkbait brainstorming report helped us realize that an industry was getting a bad reputation online for negative impact on third parties. We suggested ways they could partner with those parties to prevent negative impacts, and mitigate them when they happened. This involved product development suggestions involving motivating buyer and seller to behave better towards the third parties.
- Also in that report, we gave branding guidance to another client that would make them a dramatic change catalyst in their market. By talking about how members of their target audience were doing wonderful things, and associating their brand with ads touting these positive stories, they could become not just a company but a beloved icon of their audience. This would give them massive market share, and make it exponentially harder for competitors to take market share when people would feel such strongly positive emotions towards this company.
So if I’m suggesting merging product and marketing, the natural question is – how do you go about doing this integration? That’s a never-ending process, but you can get started by reading and implementing The E-Myth Revisited as well as Running Lean. To similar effect, the Customer Development Labs blog is fantastic and I recommend subscribing to it.
Why Product & Marketing MUST Be One Team
These are My Favorite UX Tools and Apps
Everyone nowadays knows that there are so many great UX tools for testing websites and plenty of resources available for learning web site usability that sometimes it can be hard to choose.
Keep in mind, I’m not patient and I also love free stuff.
As the wise adage goes ‘Time is money’ and while there are many excellent software applications and tools available, those that are complicated to learn are typically ignored by me.
These are My Favorite UX Tools and Apps
How WordPress took the CMS Podium
According to W3Techs, almost 55% from the 1 million most visited websites around the world that are run on a content management system (CMS) are actually run on WordPress. WordPress is a fine CMS as well as stable and easy to use, but it goes without saying that so are Joomla and Drupal. So, why does WordPress have the largest share of the top 1 million websites?
Please note that this article does not set out to prove that one CMS is “better” than the next. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and many other platforms are mature, stable, and great CMS’s.
Market Share
As a point of reference in fact, at SHOM Tek, about 40% of our projects are in Joomla! and about 35% in WordPress; the rest are written by hand in PHP, HTLM5 and CSS3 or built on a framework such as CakePHP. Some of you might be wanting to ask, “But why don’t you just use [insert your CMS of choice]?” The answer is simple: blind luck.
Breakdown of websites with a clearly identifiable CMS, according to W3Tech’s survey of the top 1 million domains.
A couple of our top clients asked us to use Joomla! or WordPress (based on their own technical requirements or preferences), so right now we have more in-house experience with WordPress and Joomla!. Our primary instinct at work and also it is our job to be flexible and to help our clients do their jobs better. While we’re able to guide the clients who don’t have a preference, we don’t want to push one technology over another.
So, rather than attempt to convince you that one CMS is best, I’ll share some data that compares WordPress to Drupal and Joomla in order to understand how and why WordPress got gold on the podium.
Name Recognition
When I try to understand how popular something is, it’s become a habit to go to is Google Trends. Based on WordPress’ market share, I expected to find that users most likely search for WordPress about five times as often as Joomla! and about nine times as often as Drupal.
However, what I found was quite different:
Global searches, as shown by Google Trends.
It turns out that, internationally, Joomla! is almost as well known as WordPress, and Drupal is searched for about a quarter as often.
This data suggests that:
- Out of the top three CMS’s out there (WordPress, Joomla and Drupal), people are choosing WordPress more often.
- Another corollary: People are choosing WordPress without searching for it.
Where WordPress Excels
Let’s be honest, most likely it probably doesn’t matter which of the top 20 CMS’s you choose to use for your project. (Curious what they are? W3Techs lists them.) They’re all reasonably secure, stable and easy to maintain. Even though WordPress might have been “only for blogging software” for a time and didn’t have the features needed to be a true CMS, you can be sure that those days are gone.
So, what does WordPress do differently than Joomla, Drupal and others?
1. Focus
Different from Joomla and Drupal, which were designed as proper CMS’s, WordPress was designed to solve a problem. Also, because WordPress had a clear target audience (bloggers), WP developers were able to build a successful business model at WordPress.com from day one.
The story of how WordPress established itself is simple: bloggers had problems, and WordPress provided services to fix those problems.
On the contrary, Drupal and Joomla tried to be “everything a geek might need”. But hey, capitalism always wins – somebody said that. Simplicity and clearly defined products are more effective than working in the abstract.
2. Ease of Use
Anyone today can set up a blog on WordPress.com and have it running in a few hours. It’s so easy that a 60-year-old IT employee can set up a company CMS without much embarrassment for not being up to date on the latest technology. It’s easy enough that a hobbyist can start their own website or blog in a weekend. Again, it’s easy enough that an old-school marketing firm can figure out their website in house and know how to use it intuitively without reading pages of manuals.
WordPress it seems is committed to working for non-technical users who want to communicate easily and effectively. So, its overall appeal makes sense when you take in consideration that people who go into communications areas (this includes sales and marketing) have a tendency to not be introverted techies.
But, let’s not forget that ease of use is an area that both Joomla and Drupal are working on. Regardless it doesn’t seem to come naturally to them, and this is evidenced by the slow progress they’re making and the fact that their aims are still being touted by techies.
According to W3Techs, 2.7% (27,000) of the 1 million most visited websites in the world run Joomla, and 1.7% (17,000 websites) run Drupal.
Let’s view that number in a different way. The graphs show how many WordPress, Drupal and Joomla websites are dedicated to blog or news, compared to being simply CMS websites.
Percentage of most popular websites run on WordPress, Drupal and Joomla that are blogs or news-related.
If we think about this, the content of a website determines its popularity, then websites that offer news or blog posts will make up the most percentage of the top million websites. A blogger or news provider tends to understand that content is usually more important than technology, so their ability to work with content will win out over “techie” features.
By plan or by luck, WordPress was designed from the very beginning to meet the needs of those who best understand how to communicate digitally.
It’s also worth noting that many of the top blogs in the world are technology-related. This is pretty relevant, because when websites such as SitePoint, Six Revisions and Smashing Magazine run on WordPress, their readers (i.e. people who are interested in Web technology) are more likely to use it, too. This gives WordPress a huge amount of built-in credibility, as well as the potential for a statistically significant editorial bias.
Estimated market share of blogs and websites running on WordPress.
Based on the above estimates, approximately 87,000 popular blogs or news websites run on WordPress, and 58,000 of the top million non-blog websites run on it, too.
To say, then, that WordPress is just blogging software is naive. Likewise, to say that WordPress is not blogging software is a bit disingenuous. The reality is that WordPress is a very successful blogging platform, as well as the world’s most successful CMS. Three to five years ago, this might not have been true, but today no one could dispute it.
Going strictly by numbers, WordPress is more of a blogging platform than Joomla or Drupal are straight CMS’ — meaning that more WordPress blogs are out there than there are Joomla and Drupal websites combined.
I mention this because some people insist that WordPress is not just blogging software. But for 87,000 popular websites, it is. Getting defensive about it would be silly. It would be like Apple saying that the iPhone isn’t a phone. It is a phone, even if it can be more than one.
Concluding
What this all comes down to is that content management systems perform a job for us, which is to manage content. Drupal and Joomla do this. WordPress as well. But judging by the market share of CMS’, WordPress just happens to do this very well and more often. WordPress without a doubt runs more websites than any other competitor.
But I was also frank and meant what I said earlier that, in most cases, any of the top three (or even the top 20) CMS’s will do the job quite well. So, picking one CMS over another seems to be determined more by the IT department’s personal preference or by the core competency of the firm you are working with or by the platform of choice for others in your industry.
In this case study it shows that users will choose the tool that best solves their problem and gets the job done. In this case, users are developers and content creators, and when they need to get things done, they want the tool that is right for the job, that is easiest to use and that gives them the best experience.
How WordPress took the CMS Podium
Search Engines Getting Better at Understanding Intent
Does Google understand user indent when they search?
All traditional Search Engine Optimization has been focused on keywords. In fact, SHOM Tek has always recommended front-loading titles and URLs with the keywords used in the content. Fall, 2013, however, Google introduced its Hummingbird algorithm, which is its first major algorithm update since the 2009 “Caffeine” update and it seems a significant shift in Google’s approach.
We’re told that the main goal of the new algorithm is to make Google capable and far better at interpreting “conversational” language and understanding the intent and of a given search rather than just a series of keywords. This is what the announcement said:
“The main focus was that the new algorithm allows Google to more quickly parse full questions (as opposed to parsing searches word-by-word), and to identify and rank answers to those questions from the content they’ve indexed.”
What this means for us is that searches like “What’s the best reviewed plumber near my home?” will factor in the full statement and pull from reviews and maps in addition to just keywords. This shift in fact comes from the overall change in user behavior.
Over the years, searchers have leaned on the instinct of typing questions directly into Google rather than search terms. Here’s a screenshot of the rise in popularity of the search terms “How do I” and “How do you” over the last few years.
In the future, we expect that the role of natural or conversational language will play an even bigger part in search engine optimization. We believe that this move toward search intent is actually a really good augur for inbound marketers whose core strategy involves creating useful content aimed at answering user questions.
Instead of only thinking about keywords that describe your services or products, think about the questions your customer would ask to find your company online and then create content around that.
Search Engines Getting Better at Understanding Intent
What is the cost of creating a Logo?
It is not uncommon for young children to point at a McDonald’s golden arches while walking or being driven and yell, “French fry!”
According to the infographic below, 67 percent of 2-3-year-old children can correctly match logos and products.
For example, when Pepsi revamped its logo in 2008, the redesign set the company back $1 million. But Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, created his company’s logo himself for free. Also interesting: Twitter bought its logo from iStockphoto for $15.
So, how do million-dollar logos ingrain themselves in the minds of toddlers and adults alike? A lot of it has to do with color, the infographic explains. For example, McDonald’s arches are yellow. We often associate the color yellow with joy and energy. And let’s be honest: French fries are enough to make almost everyone feel joyous.
Other examples of logos that play off color include:
Ford: The blue logo inspires confidence, trust and comfort—exactly what you want from a car company.
UPS: The brown logo evokes feelings of reliability, dependability and support. A delivery company should be all of those things.
Firefox: The orange fox suggests creativity, enthusiasm and high mental activity, which most Web browsers would want to be known for.
For more on logo costs and how the symbols are designed, check out the graphic:
What is the cost of creating a Logo?