The figures infact are very good to look at for other dot com entrepreneurs too. Here is the brief approximate figure -

Annual Net Profit After Tax (Ending March 2008) : 27 Crores

Total Number Of Equity Shares Listed : 27 Crore Shares Approx

Price Per Share As Of Today : 1000 Rupees (Averaged over past few trading sessions)

Market Cap (Company Value) : 2700 Crores

Average P/E Ratio : 100 Times

(Figures have been rounded off to come at a rough conclusion).

So we find the P/E Ratio around 100. What does that mean actually ? It means that if someone buys a share of the company , he pays 100 years worth of profits per share. In other words, if someone wants to buy the whole company along with the brand, he has to pay for 100 years profits. It includes intellectual property , brand value, future prospects and everything else. Now compare this with average P/E ratio of other companies listed. Most are 20 - 25. The best brands like Reliance Industries has 25 - 30 approx. And moreover this is not the first company to have this. Companies which have prospects of scaling up have such high values. Mr. Sanjeev Bikhchandani , Founder and Chairman owns approx 52% of shares which makes him worth around 1500 crores. The company’s profit after tax (PAT) is around 2.5 crores every month.

This just gives an idea about how much potential a dot com company has ! If you have a well branded website or a group of sites or portals which are popular and are used enough by people, which fills a large market gap or which solves a problem, has a good domain name and enough traffic and usability and finally is one which has a capacity to scale up quickly, you are going to be worth billions.

Cheers !!

Sponsored By: BestSiteArchive Web Directory

The first session was led by Sanjay Tiwari of JuxtConsult, a research company. They shared some very interesting data from a survey conducted by them. The report is actually very costly and usually used by corporates. He shared some interesting analytics of the Indian web traffic. Important points were like 32% of Indian Internet users do have a credit card. 82% are males and 18% are females and 63% of them own a vehicle. There were some more interesting numbers which i cannot discuss in detail here.

Followed by that, there were sessions by Ansoo Gupta from Pinstorm where she talked about some basic things which were meant for Indian merchants and advertisers trying to build their online presence. She discussed about places where SEO and SEM could be beneficial to the merchants. The session was followed by Pradeep Chopra of OMLogic consulting where he discussed the journey of his earlier company Whizlabs, how they started modest and scaled up so fast and acquired corportate customers without meeting them !! Thats the power of Internet which no one can deny. His current company provides consulting services to Multinationals.

It was followed by a wonderful lunch networking session.

The next session was basically on SEO by Geetu Ahuja, Head- Online Marketing at Naukri.com (Inlcuiding 99 Acres and JeevanSaathi). Geetu worked with pradeep in his earlier ventures and then joined Naukri. I met her during the tea break later to ask her opinion on some topics like Affiliate Marketing in India and the analytics software she preferred to use. I felt that, she was one with a in depth knowledge on concerned topics.

The next session was by Rahul Nanda, COO of WebChutney where he talked about Viral Marketing. This was where i learned something new which I haven’t researched on so far. He visualized some funny creatives they did for Airtel, and some other indian companies and he talked about how they popularize the creatives and make them go viral. Then he also showed the stats of some pages after the creatives were launched. Amazing results !

The next few sessions were not that interesting, but there was still something to learn.

Some of the most important lessons which, i felt i learnt was that, we should never underestimate the numbers unless we have authentic information. I had been doing affiliate marketing and was shocked to know that, Yatra.com gets some 1000 sales / bookings per day just from their direct affiliates. ( I will be going to Yatra’s office tomorrow to meet and discuss some stuff with the affiliate marketing department about the creatives which i have used on some 30 new hotel related sites targetted on Indian cities which are exclusively being monetized through yatra.com affiliate program). I even didn’t know that there are such a large number of people who use internet more than 3 hours per day who have a credit card. Well even if the number is 30 lakhs and might look very less, but it is actually 30 lakhs. Its not less. Why do we compare to the whole population of the country ? We have 30 lakh people whom we can market e-commerce services !!!

Followed by that, we had a party at a restaurant till late night with me , Jim , Tarun and Gaurav (Not a part of the conference and has nothing to do with other delegates)

Finally, the conference was actually worth attending and I will be present at similar summits and conferences in future related to Internet Marketing.

Program at the summit -

1. Good affiliate networks have a difficult signup process - They wont simply approve you right away after a day. You will probably be rejected in all good affiliate networks at once unless you talk to them and explain them why they should choose you. Your past performance in affiliate marketing and what sort of performance they should expect from you. Your knowledge level and dedication to the work. They don’t want people who have idle accounts after the first months payments.

2. Level of interaction with the affiliates - They must not take hours to respond to emails or IMs and must not keep you on hold when you call them. They should be keen to maintain a good relation with their affiliates and answer their questions and concerns promptly.

3. They must be flexible with payments - So I requested my affiliate network that if they send me frequent payments (weekly / bi-weekly) by wire then I would be able to pay back my CC Bills and scale up faster. They agreed to it. This is a example of flexibility. I want a custom tracking pixel placed on the conversion page, and they did it ! They should also be able to negotiate payouts for certain offers if you think it is less.

4. Individual affiliate managers assigned to affiliates for better interaction over IM. They should be able to disclose which offers on their networks are performing well and better.

5. They should offer payments by Wire / Paypal (Almost all networks offer cheque payments. Some don’t offer wire and paypal like CJ/Clickbank which actually sucks).

Affiliate Networks I Really Love -

1. NeverBlueAds  :- I love this affiliate network a lot. Their special feature is that you can place a custom pixel on the conversion page of the advertisers. So infact you can place your Google Adwords / Adcenter / Adbrite / Yahoo pixels on the conversion page which allows you to know which keywords are converting directly in your PPC account. This feature is offered by other networks as well but only when requested by larger affiliates. NeverBlue provides it directly in their tools section. Their interface is damn cool and they keep a one on one touch with their affiliates through IM. They will even agree to send you bi-weekly payments on Net 15 basis provided you can do volumes upto 1000 - 2000$ per day.

2. Incent-A-Click or CX Digital Media :- Few of their programs are currently bringing me 200% ROI with traffic from second tier search engines. They also were convinced on increasing the payout to make it more profitable. Some exclusive offers they provide are not provided on other networks and are extremely well converting for PPC traffic. They also allow you to place your pixel on the conversion page, but thats not available in the affiliate panel. You have to request them personally to get the pixel placed. Excellent Affiliate support and awesome gifts !!!.

3. Azoogle :- One of the oldest among all networks and a huge list of programs to promote. Very hard to get into unless recommended by someone or until you convince them that you will bring large volumes of sales. Moreover they won’t ask you to make 20K USD to send a wire. You can get a wire transfer even if you make 50$. All they want is a W8 form sent by Courier which sucks. They don’t want any faxes. Some of their offers (Especially In Insurance Niche) have a lower payout compared to other networks. Most famous for their Flycell ringtones program. I personally know people doing 10000$ - 20000$ per day with azoogle. Excellent quality support and flexible payout system.

4. RocketProfit :- New Affiliate network with great programs but a bit poor payouts and poor interface. They seriously need redesign. Easy to get into. Automated approvals. They approve anyone who applies. Though they have a very good support but payments are not flexible. They pay only by paypal and check. You need 5000$ for two months to get a wire payment which sucks for many people.  The payment is Net 15 based and monthly. No chances of increase in payment frequency. No negotiations on the payouts. Still, I like them since some of their offers performed well for me. They also allow you to place your pixel on the conversion page, but thats not available in the affiliate panel. You have to request them personally to get the pixel placed.

5. Hydra Media :- Large list of programs to promote and good support offered by them. Flexible payment methods include wire / paypal and check. I am new to this network but i still like them since some of their programs did absolutely magic for me in the past week. 200% ROI on some exclusive programs offered by them on their network. Very good support over IM / Phone and flexible payouts. They also allow you to place your pixel on the conversion page, but thats not available in the affiliate panel. You have to request them personally to get the pixel placed.

Affiliate Networks which suck -

1. CJ and Clickbank :- Why ? No way to connect to them easily except emails which takes days for reply. Permanent hold when you call their phone. No personal touch with affiliates. Apply for each program (CJ) to get approved and most will be instantly declined for non-US affiliates. This makes split testing of offers very difficult. No facility to place pixels on conversion pages. No Flexiblity in payout. You cannot negotiate payouts for offers. No Flexibility in payment methods (Clickbank checks suck me dry !! I hate waiting 30 days to get payments !) The above networks release paypal or wire payments which means cash in your hand in 2 days).

Participants are required to keep this link on their participating page -UK Webmaster World SEO Contest

Well, I will not work to win this contest anyhow since i feel it is not worthy to spend much time and money on it. But still I am in the contest and my entry is the very post you are reading. Let me try my luck

Sponsored By: BestSiteArchive Web Directory

1. Subscribing to his RSS feeds.

2. Blogging about the contest (Like this post) on your blog.

Winner will get 500$ by paypal or an Amazon Gift certificate. Winner will be announced on 6th March, 2008 which is 20 days from now.

More detail about the contest can be found here.

You can generate a sitemap and submit it to google webmasters console to get your website indexed quickly in google. You can submit a Text, XML or HTML sitemap. I would prefer to submit a XML sitemap to google webmasters and upload an HTML sitemap to my website and link to it from footer. Just update the sitemap every few weeks (only if your site is regularly updated).

For example, i generated a sitemap for my Web Hosting website. Here are all the three of them, Text , HTML and XML

Lets see how your strategy should be in such cases. Assume that you just setup a new site on a preety new domain with original content. The site is just 1 day old and not indexed in google, it has 50 pages total and your SEO budget is roughly 150$ per month. How do you start with the SEO Work ? Go through this -

1. Make sure that your site is well optimized on on-page factors. Do some basic keyword research and spread desired keywords on pages , title and meta tags. Link some keywords to the relevant pages of the site so that the spiders are sure that the page xxx is related to the keyword yyy. Concentrate more on framing better title tags.

2. Spot pages which you don’t want the spiders to index, and exclude these pages through robots.txt.

3. Register on Google Webmaster Central and verify your site. Make a list of URLs of all the pages of your website and save it as sitemap.txt in your site’s root folder. Then submit this file to google webmaster’s central as sitemap.

4. Install Google Analytics to keep track of the stats.

5. Now you need some links pointing to the site, so that it gets well indexed and little bit boosted in the search engines. Apart from that, you don’t need to build links to the homepage only. Links must point one each to all internal pages. For getting the thing started, lets have a target of 1 link each to each page. A better way to do this is through blog posts. You can goto some good webmaster forums like the digitalpoint link sales section and make a thread there that you want to buy blog reviews. Just remember to avoid blog networks as much as possible since the will only hurt your site. Avoid buying sitewide links, links from footers or directories. Buy links only which is embedded in between some article or content. Article directories will work equally good if they are quality. Buy blog reviews from individual blogs owned by individual owners. The blogs should not be interlinked. Just buy one post from each person. Say each blog post has 3 links pointing to your website, 1 to the homepage and 2 links to internal pages. You have a total of 50 pages on your website, so you will need 25 blog posts to make sure that there exists one link atleast to every page on the site. Spread this work across a period of one month. Make sure that you only buy 1 - 2 posts per day, and not more than that, to make the stuff look original to the spiders. Make sure that the review which is written on the blog contains your keywords to increase relevancy, and your desired keywords are anchored and linked to the pages you want. The payment can be anything, for a PR3 blog review will come as cheap as 3$ and PR5 may be done at 10$. For 25 reviews, it will cost you an average of 100  - 150$. The most important thing is to judge whether the blog you are buying a review is really worth buying it or not. There are many ways to do this, follow this -

• Check pagerank, but use pagerank to decide the price and not the quality. A PR2 blog may sometime give you more value than a PR5 blog.
• Goto yahoo siteexplorer and type link:www.blogdomainname.com and check, if the blog has enough links. Make sure that the blog has minimum 500 links indexed by yahoo.
• Goto Google and type link:www.blogdomainname.com and see if there are atleast 5 - 10 links indexed by google pointing to the blog.
• Goto Google and type site:www.blogdomainname.com and see if there are atleast 50+ pages indexed by google from the blog.
• Goto www.digpagerank.com and type in the blog domain name. If the PageRank values appear in Green then the blog has got good pagerank, if it shows RED then the pagerank is fake and you could expose the guy, he is probably trying to scam you.
• See if the blog got atleast some rank and authority on technorati. You can find by doing a technorati search using the blog’s domain name. For example my blog is listed here on technorati here. It has an authority of 59 and a rank of 1,26,758. Make sure your blog has atleast some authority. 5 - 10 should be enough.

6. Make use of social bookmarking services and get your site pages bookmarked at social networking websites. You can do it yourself or hire someone. People on webmaster forums do this for 3$ - 5$. You can get one done for your homepage and perhaps 3 - 4 pages a month.

7. Stay away from directory submissions initially.

8. Start a blog on your own site at the url www.domain.com/blog/. Make a post on it daily with some very interesting topic and submit it to popular bookmarking sites like digg, stumbleupon , del.icio.us. Syndicate your blog feeds through feedburner and use chicklets. Install top commentors plugin and promote user participation in your blog. Try to create a community around the blog. The traffic on the blog will help you to get traffic on the main site and more organic links.

Follow the above for few months, till then, let me think what more you can do ….. Keep Coming Back to AdityaSpeaks