“If your business is not on the internet, then your business will be out of business”

– Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft

In this fast-moving world, websites and mobile applications hold the topmost pitch in the business growth. They help in conveying the products and services of the companies to their prospective clients in the most effective way. They are the face of any business and more often the heart. You cannot go about thinking to accost the best sales, users or clients without having the sound portfolio in the form of an excellent mobile application or website.

Similarly, the content plays a very crucial role in business expansion. You need to inform about your work to the right people in a persuasive way wherever they are. The content in your professional blogs, websites or any guest posts should convey your thoughts, ideas, insight, and knowledge in a simple yet compelling manner. Good content presented in a readable format does wonder.

But what if you have a highly sophisticated website designed and developed by the incredibly talented people and yet out of reach of targeted readers? Even with the innovative product, how do you justify no traffic?

What’s wrong here?

Can you guess?
Yes! The digital marketing is the ‘heroine’ of any growing business in the present scenario. It knows how to attract people. There is no chance a business can grow in a fully fledged manner without exploiting the complete potential of digital marketing tools. You have to have the access to the world-class SEOs and SMMs to bring the reach of your product to the larger crowd.
Otherwise, you know the fate of documentary movies. No matter how great the director, screenplay, actors are, it cannot come at par with commercial cinema in business because it lacks massive launching, promotions, teasers, marketing, and another such tact.
It is need of the hour. Even the conventional businesses are now adapting to these new
mediums to keep up with the cut-throat competition.

Thus, it becomes highly important to ensure that your websites and apps are designed and developed on the right platform using appropriate technologies with superior talents to pour ideas and market it.

Best Way to find Freelancers

Businesses and individuals often approach freelancers to outsource their IT needs.
Outsourcing projects help companies in many ways:
1) Cost Saving: Getting projects developed from freelancer/remote team is effectively cost saving than getting them designed by in-house team as then you have to provide them fully functional office looking after their refreshments, taxes, cash-on-leaves etc or via agency where huge commissions are involved with apparently more fees, lesser transparency and no direct involvement with the developer.
2) World Class Talent: You can easily access the top talent around the world without much effort and movement.
3) Flexibility: It is an easy and relieving experience to give charge of the work to the experts and forget about it as they will take care of the rest. Unlike in-house team where you need to keep them motivated and busy, freelancers keep themselves self-motivated and active.
Upwork is one big name in the freelance market that has been around for 10+ years.
Even if you are naïve in this domain, you still have heard the name at some point. With the growing irrelevant crowd on the website and ever-increasing unacknowledged issues, the site has recently lost its credibility both towards clients and developers.
As they say, you need to keep updating your product if you want to survive in the IT industry else you gradually disappear from the game.
Filtering desirable freelancers from websites like Upwork is a laborious job and highly unreliable way of getting work done. Here the success rate is not 100%.
You may succeed in finding the right developer for your idea but there are high chances you end up getting bluffed and betrayed. This often results in handing over your project to some other freelancer and having to pay extra charges thereafter.

Let us understand this problem in a more fundamental way:
1) Let’s say you post a project.
2) Some 30+ freelancers apply for it. Some of them do not even check the essentials required like skills, qualifications etc
3) The best freelancers still did not apply as they are already over-packed with the existing work.
4) People displaying false experiences and skills is a well-known phenomenon.
5) After 10 days of analysis to find the best developer, you select the one with the best score (someone who has the better ranking, good rates, and good reviews).
6) What if it is an agency which takes the work from you and again outsources to someone else? You would not be able to interact with the developer directly.
7) Most of the freelancers work full time in other companies. They take up extra work as a freelancer to earn some quick money.
They would never spend enough time checking the environment, understanding the client’s requirement and guiding them through the best-customized approach to get work done.
8) Finally, what if the developer does not pick your call or leave the project incomplete?
Yes, Upwork does have a rating system but there is no real way to confirm if the developer you hire is trustworthy and dedicated towards the work and also it does not assure the communication ease of the freelancer.
Even on investing 10-12 days in selecting the right candidate to accomplish your task, you could still choose the wrong person, not deliberately but by mere less awareness and transparency.
Websites like upwork are often criticized for this big downside. People become victims to these fraud profiles and end up spending more money than their initial budget.

What’s the solution?                
In the midst of this chaos, few companies worked hard to rectify issues faced with upwork and came up with the outstanding products.
EngineerBabu:
How about if you have someone who does all the analysis of your project and guides you find the expert developer to meet all the requirements and get the work done in the best possible way?
That’s EngineerBabu!

EngineerBabu is an Indian company that helps in connecting the perfect partner for all your IT needs with the aid of domain experts.
It basically reduces your days of efforts required in filtering the right candidate. It curates highly skilled people from all over the places and gets you handpicked experts to work for your dream.
Removing the wheat from the chaff is a work in itself.
Businesses opting to this website are often startups or SME’s looking to grow flexibly by hiring freelancers to handle projects rather than in-house or via agencies.
They operate as part of what has become “talent cloud” with hundreds of freelancers offering a range of skills in a flexible and efficient basis.
They also promote the benefits of freelancing and remote team as a means to allow people to work more freely in the environment that suits them best.
It provides resources for new and growing businesses and for those who are looking to build a career as a freelancer.
How EngineerBabu helps you to find the perfect IT partner

Here are the best alternatives we consider –

For the Freelancers or IT Company:

1. Create a profile and go through verification.
2. After you are verified, choose projects matching your skills.
3. If you are a paid plan user, you can directly apply and the client will get a notification.
4. We help clients choose a developer and connect them over email.
5. You can also work in-house.

For the client:

1) Engineerbabu team discusses the idea with the client taking down their requirements. (Technology, scope, budget etc)
2) It connects the developer with a client over email for further developments.
There is no bidding system as we provide the best options appropriate for the project. We avoid unnecessary time consumption with bidding process where large numbers of people send proposals and most of them are not even eligible.
3) The team takes follow-ups both from the client and developer from time to time to know the progress.
4) The client can keep the check on the development and progress of the project through our free project management tool “BaseCamp”.
5) Engineerbabu experts spend a lot of time in testing the product and further plan strategies for its promotion.
6) People seem happy and satisfied with the process.

Guru.com:

Based in the US, Guru.com is yet another global freelancing marketplace for freelance workers and employers to partner on a contract basis. It is fairly easy to use with around 1.5 million members worldwide.
How Guru.com helps you:

1) Guru offers a vast network of freelancers to help you accomplish your creative, technical or business projects.
2) Here you are allowed as a freelancer to bid for the certain number of projects for free. After a while, you will have to switch to a paid membership.
3) It is free for the employer, thus in favor of clients.
4) The portal charges a fee from freelancers in the form of transaction fee and membership fee which are quite hefty.
5) Like many other sites with plenty of freelancers, clients have to take the pain to filter the suitable candidate from a large number of proposals.
6) You select a freelancer by evaluating their profile on the basis of reviews, recommendations, testimonials etc.
7)  Guru has an inbuilt project management tool called “Work Room” where you can assign work to the freelancer, keep a check on the progress, share files, define milestones etc.
8) Another good part of this site is it uses the system called “SafePay” which makes sure that you do any payment only after you approve of the project.
PeoplePerHour:

PeoplePerHour is a UK based company that provides a platform for thousands of freelance experts in hundreds of different fields.
As a leading marketplace to find freelancers, jobs can be availed on an hourly basis and can be ramped up as needed to build the whole team online, thus this model is scalable up to the global enterprise.
How PeoplePerHour helps you:
1) Here you get a choice to select from entry-level experience to expert level freelancer.
The prices are fairly reasonable. It is advisable to pick expert freelancer every time as you would find quality skills set only with the experts here.
2) You have to use filters here to opt according to your parameters such as country, experience level, project type etc
It is advisable to wait for the good proposal to arrive. Due to the availability of plenty of freelancers, it happens that many of them apply without checking the details. Thus, it is advantageous to wait and get completely satisfied before handing over your project.
3) It offers various options to be in touch with a freelancer including an inbuilt video calling feature.
4) It has a little-complicated interface which might trouble you in the beginning.
5) Payment needs to be deposited in PeoplePerHour account right when you accept the proposal. Money is held in the escrow and is released as soon as you approve the project.
6) If for any reason, the client cancels the deal, he will be charged 10% of the fee.

Fiverr:

How Fiverr helps you:

1) Fiverr got its name from “five dollar” where every service and task accounts for $5 as their base price.
2) It is the global online market for freelancers and companies to provide their services at much cheaper prices.
3) As the prices are low, so is the quality. You can still get the simple tasks like business card designing, HTML website designing and others done.
4) It is good when you want the product to be developed without much complexity, innovation and quality.
5) It is suitable for very small businesses where work is required to be done very quickly without much detailing.
I hope you find a suitable freelancer according to the need of your project. Some tips that may come handy while taking your decision.
 
“The master has failed more times than the beginner has ever tried”
                                                                                                              – Stephen McCranie

1) Always choose experienced people over newbie, it definitely helps in the long-term relationship.
 
“Quality is the best business plan” – John Lasseter

2) All companies have a development budget, and it is understandable to work within that budget. However, you should never let price alone drive your choices. Let the product and the quality of the developer’s work determine who you hire. A quality product is a brand in itself and branding comes with a price.
3) Get NDA signed before sharing your idea. The NDA form is available in Google or you can ask your developer to share his NDA template.
NDA terms are;

• Not to share your code
• Reuse your code
• Can’t work on similar domain or idea for 2 years
• Can’t work with your competitor
• Company or the employees cannot start another company using your idea or its piece.

4) Ask for the portfolio before hiring anyone. In the samples provided, check for the user interface and evaluate the expertise of the developer and team.
5) You can also ask the contact numbers of previous clients of the concerned freelancer/developer. It will help you to know about the quality of work delivered, work ethics, time management etc.

A reliable and an intelligent freelancer is the ultimate requirement of any project.  I hope you find your desirable one keeping these points in mind.

The post What are the best alternatives to find freelancers? appeared first on EngineerBabu Blog.

We are well aware of the influence it leaves on the online audience over a period.  Considering platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and so on, we have got a lot more options to thrive upon.

Twitter, as we know, is more of a micro-blogging web app and has gained popularity for various kinds of businesses over the time.

You have to make sure that every tweet you do is just confined to 140 characters and that’s what game is all about.
You have to win your customer or client by 140 characters. Social media is more of a taboo these days because it is a platform where people connect and communicate in both a professional and a personal way.
In fact, Social Media Marketing is considered to be a key element when it comes to marketing your business.

So, the question is how you will incorporate your business with your consumer domain?

First things first, business in not merely a professional relationship through which you can sell your services and products.
Business is where your services and products actually revolve around a customer’s psychology and their emotions.
You don’t sell merely a product; you sell a solution to their problems. You do not deal with just a person but their emotions too. Following are Twitter marketing tips for your startup–

Best way to Use Twitter for Marketing your Startup

1. Promote other Twitter members:

Dude, that’s one hell of advice, isn’t it? Well, it might sound like a big-deal but it isn’t.

Promoting others doesn’t mean you go on re-tweeting other peoples tweets just for the sake of getting retweeted.
You have to be honest about whatever you promote. Say, for example, you follow a twitter account of the famous star and often retweet their postings, that means you believe and agree to what that person believes in.
You have to make sure that whatever you share of your fellow Twitterati, it must add some value to your followers.

The key here is to grow your network via following and retweeting others. So, bringing someone’s tweet in the limelight will ultimately lead you towards the limelight.

The retweets that you do can be in any possible form. Your retweet may be any gesture, an appreciation or any kind of Thanksgiving.
Whatever form it takes, you have to make sure that you mean every word you mention. You have to retweet the posts which you believe would entertain and add value to your followers/niche.

2. Be Consistent to Build Trust:

To build your audience, it is very necessary that you be consistent. Once you establish a Twitter account and gain some followers, it is very important that you do not discontinue the frequency of your tweets.

People over the web follow you because they think and believe that you have something new to say and share on a daily basis.
If you break this trust, you’ll be doomed. You see, the point is that the people over the web have got many options over this huge WEB, if not you than someone else. There is a cut throat competition going on, and you can’t imagine how badly your competitors are willing to pull your leg down and smack you down.

It is possible that over the time you have work that’s piled up and are unfinished priorities.

So, to not-miss managing your Twitter account, you can schedule your tweets well in advance, or you can have a manager to manage your social media accounts (if you can afford it).
It is not that time consuming because tweets are maxed at 140 characters. There are many tools available to schedule your tweets.

3. Be active:

There is no point in having a social media account if you hardly stay updated and update people simultaneously.

If you are not active, you’re dead. The thing about social media sites and applications are that you have your own community.
You build your own community over the time. And when it’s about business, you have your assets attached to such social cultures on the web – your customers.
If you just build a community and aren’t active enough, you’ll lose everything you have built.

You should update your features, plus points and every little detail about your services and products in the most effective manner possible.

Twitter is the best place to find the right nerve and hit directly over there. Your clients which lie in various parts of the world will get to know your company and company ethics in the most entertaining and techie way possible.

4. Don’t lose focus from your niche:

So, how does this term fit into this article? Confused? Okay, so niche here means the niche of your products or services.

You have to make sure that whatever you post, it must be in some of the other way related to your products.
Social media posts can be done in many categories and in many ways. They are direct promotion, indirect promotion and so on.
So, if you sell earphones and headsets and are tweeting something about ADELE’s new song “HELLO”, there must be some inter-linking element to both the ends.

You cannot blindly go on tweeting about anything, because that might in some case add value to your customers but not your business.

Try interlinking your products and launch a campaign which can last for a week or two. It is easy to get noticed when you have a generic tweet related to your product. This is a part of social media marketing.

5. Your tweets are supposed to be BANG-ON:

So, when you are done with the above steps but still lag behind, what could be the possible reason? It might be possible that your tweets are too numb and lame.

What is the point of tweeting on a regular basis even when there are no engagements on your tweets or no-one retweets? It hurts, right?

See, there can be multiple ways to win your customer, and your job is to find out that via different experiments.

Even Edison had to try a thousand times to get the bulb working. No, the point here is not about trying out for thousands of times but rather innovating your tweets. Arrange some quiz, giveaways, contests, awards, tweet-a-thon, etc. which would engage your followers. Share some facts or try reaching out for new ideas via your customers.

The best and worst part about Twitter is that it’s only 140 characters. It’s upon you to choose wisely and work smartly with your twitter handle.

Don’t just push it to headlines, bring it in an all-new form to say the same thing. You could turn a quote related to your devices into the headline of your tweet. Cool, isn’t it? You have got the spice, so start sprinkling.

I really hope that these tips might help you change your startup/business for the better. I hope it helps you out build a great Twitter community.

We have Startups and Entrepreneurs to help you build wireframe by visualizing your need. You may get in touch with us at EngineerBabu.

The post 5 Twitter Marketing Tips for your Startup appeared first on EngineerBabu Blog.