Online presentation sharing website authorSTREAM has launched a marketplace for PowerPoint templates and diagrams where different templates providers are offering high quality templates and diagrams at very competitive prices. Any template or diagram costs just $3.99 in comparison to stand alone templates websites where this price varies from $9 to $300.
Currently the marketplace has 60,000 professionally designed slides under more than 40 categories which means there is a template for all the occasions and business needs. With this launch authorSTREAM wants to bring PowerPoint templates industry together at one platform thus providing more business opportunities to template companies and high quality affordable templates to presentation creators. On the lines of iStockphoto if authorSTREAM extends this marketplace to individual template designers who today have no way to showcase and sell their PowerPoint templates, that would be a game changer and win-win for everyone involved.
Social media has evolved greatly in last few years and today it is as important as SEO. With Google changing its search algorithms every now and then, social media has become an important place to channelize traffic and generate leads. Brands are keeping a big chunk of their marketing budget for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. However, for start-ups and small brands it’s not possible to spend thousand of dollars for social media promotions. They are merely depended on in-house social media teams who post and engage with audience or use scheduling tools like HootSuite or Tweet-deck for round the clock posting. Despite all these efforts and round the clock posting they couldn’t reach all of their fans or friends due to different algorithms in place. One such algorithm is EdgeRank algorithm.
If you are a social media buff, you must be aware of Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm. Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm which works on factors like Affinity, weight and time, decides which posts of yours would appear on your friend’s timeline or news-feed. In most cases the reach would limit to 16% or may vary between 16 to 20%. There are so many suggestions over the web to increase your Facebook reach like keeping your posts short, using pictures or videos, engaging via QnA, relevancy or selecting the best time for your posts.
If you have tried all these suggestions and are still not getting traction, try Trendify this. Trendifythis uses a algorithm that studies the social graphs to understand how they are inter-connected and uses a combination of posting on friend’s news-feed or notify them via message to ensure that 80% of your friends get the post. You would need to download Trendifythis Chrome extension as well in order to automate Facebook posting.
One of the challenges that Google DFP (Ad manager) account managers especially those who are new often face is to set up different Ad banners for different regions or countries and to test them out. The challenge is not to set up different Ad banners since that can be easily done by creating different line items and selecting target criteria and setting Geography. Challenge is to verify whether correct banners appear in targeted region or country? One can easily verify the Ad banners for the country or region he or she is browsing in but to verify Ad banners in other countries either you need a remote server in all those regions or countries or use some good proxy. You may also seek help of your friends if you are lucky enough to have friends in all those countries.
If you don’t have access to all the things mentioned above, try this simple technique and you would be able to see Ad banners from most parts of the world. Visit some performance testing website which has option to select country and which also provides screen shots in result set.
Two such websites are http://www.webpagetest.org/ and http://loads.in/. By using these websites you would be able to verify which Ad banners appear in different countries. Using this technique you can test any public web page and make sure that Ad is rendering fine without any hiccups.
World’s second largest online presentation sharing website authorSTREAM, today, launched a new presentation embed which can automatically decide on the fly as to which player to show to your blog readers. On flash devices, a flash player capable of playing animation, transitions and audio is rendered while viewers of non flash devices like iPad see a HTML player which sans animation and sound but displays text and images.
authorSTREAM has created it’s own niche as a presentation player which replicates slide show experience online by retaining the basic elements of a PowerPoint like animations, transitions and sound.
Below is complete press release from authorSTREAM:
authorSTREAM, an online presentation-sharing platform, has just released Dynamic Embed, a new feature that works smoothly with all flash and non-flash devices, thereby empowering blog and website owners by relieving them of the former hassle of reformatting their presentations for multiple PowerPoint-sharing platforms. Even more, it offers the best possible viewing experience for users of blogs and websites, resulting in satisfied site visitors that will return again and again.
With Dynamic Embed, bloggers and website owners no longer have to modify their presentations to suit the needs of various viewing platforms, because they can easily embed their presentations in a way that can be viewed on all devices—including flash devices like personal computers and laptops, as well as non-flash devices like iPhones and iPads. In addition, this intelligent embed automatically detects whether a viewer is using a flash-supported device or a non-flash-supported device and then renders a compatible presentation, without any need for manual formatting. Dynamic Embed also supports animations, transitions, sounds, rehearsed timings, and other special effects on flash devices like computers and laptops.
Harman Singh, CEO of authorSTREAM says, “This will have far-reaching benefits for bloggers and website owners, who earlier had to sacrifice animations and other multimedia effects from their presentation so that it met the requirements of online sharing platforms. The bloggers [and website owners] were left with no option but to choose static presentation output on their blogs and websites, as it could be viewed on all devices. Not anymore with Dynamic Embed.”
Users of Dynamic Embed can easily access the feature from an authorSTREAM tab conveniently located next to the uploaded presentation. From there, users can even customize the feature with their preference of color theme, border color, embed size, border size, and more, giving their presentations a unique appearance.
About authorSTREAM: With more than 4 million registered users and 5 million monthly visitors, authorSTREAM is the second largest slide-sharing platform. Launched in 2007, it is a free online community that gives members access to thousands of presentations on hundreds of subjects. With authorSTREAM, you can upload your PowerPoint presentations for free and share them with your friends, students, colleagues, and peers across the globe.
For any start-up, getting a user base of million users is counted as a big achievement. For some it may be a break even situation and for others it may be the right time for pitching the product to investors to raise funding. It may take years for any start-up to get to the magic number of one million. Besides offering a quality product, start-ups need to work out SEO, SEM with a strong presence on various social media platforms. As the financial and human resources are limited for most of the start-ups so every small decision can make and mar the future growth of the product.
Here are some quick tips from Adam Smith, the founder of Xobni (Outlook add-in) and Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox on how to get from Zero to a Million Users.
VigLink enables you to get paid for doing what you normally do on your blog or site. Whenever you link to a product, website, or promotion, VigLink turns that link into an affiliate link so that you receive a commission for any purchases made. On your webpage you probably already link to a number of recommended products or companies, but only affiliate links allow you to get paid if one of your visitors makes a purchase at the linked site. Specifically, an affiliate link tells a site that its customer has come from your site, so you can receive a commission on the sale. VigLink automatically affiliates the links in your content. VigLink follows along with clicks leaving your site. When a reader buys something, you get paid. Here are two videos which explains it all.
