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Usability and user centered design for long has been ragarded as a second priority by software companies and consumer product companies. In the recent times the focus has started to shift to better the existing models.

Steve Krug’s book “Don’t make me think” probably was the first one that started a new phase in usability design and usability as a discipline started to emerge.

The idea is simple. A user should not have to read a 100 page manual and take a training course to get started using a product, but take a look around and you find all the enterprise softwares take weeks and months of training just to get the users comfortable with the idea of using a SAP or an Oracle.

Companies spend millions of dollars in licensing enterprise software and then some more on training their employees to sue this software, most times all the features and so called flexibility that these enterprisey softwares provide is never used by these companies, but they do make the software difficult to use.

Learning stress is something that every organization needs to evaluate when buying a enterprise software. If a lean software would make it easier for their employees to get their job done than that should be prefered over a “infinite feature enterprise” software that scares the hell out of your employees.

Enterprise software will never take a enterprise anywhere if the employees are never going to use it, and user adoption for many enterprise software projects end up beiing low enough to not justify the huge investments.

Software shouldn’t be another full time job your employees need to do, they don’t need to learn, read, operate, make mistake, upgrade, learn again, ask, ask some more, ask “whos the right guy to ask this?”, ask “how do i”, ask “where is the IT guy?” or say “this software sucks”.

Stay lean, stay agile, get the work done. Simple is beautiful.

Web promotion is a important part of any companies marketing strategy. But most companies and individuals are get lost in the available sources online.

Here is are 10 most important steps for any company thinking of using internet to fill their lead pipelines.

1. Search engine optimization

In the information its best to attract your customers by information. Search engine optimization is a way by which you release quality content for your target audience and then nake sure the content is found on the major search engines.

This is why bigger companies like IBM, SUN, Microsoft let users create blogs on their website and write content.

2. pay per click advertising

Pay per click advertising means placing ads in search engines at the instant a user is searching for information, while being placed in the natural results would be the best option it is not possible to rank high for thousands of keywords. the next best thing is to pay search engine a per click price which decided by auction.

Be extremely careful with pay per click as it can rob of your marketing budget very quickly, the effectiveness of the campaign depends on campaign design.

This post is not complete, please visit back for further post.

3.  Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is increase leads and business by letting other people(called affiliates) and pay them a commission on sale or leads generated.

No successful business online can grow without an affiliate system in place, affiliate system lets you increase your sales power many times without actually hiring a sales team.

4. Email marketing

Email marketing as the name suggests means using emails to market your products or services. This can be the best form of marketing and lead generation or the best waste of marketing time you ever did if you do not do it rightly.

Email marketing can be further categorised as mass mailing, permission marketing to your list, permission marketing to someone elses list, email marketing to custom targetted lists developed by you or marketing to a email marketing database.

keep in mind everyone hates spam as much as y ou do. When you send a mail make sure its sent to a specfic audience who really would be interested in your product or service. Its waste of time and more importantly it hurts your brand.

This article is a stub and will be continued further….