Introducing the latest Union Territory of India, Ladakh, lying in the northern most part of the country as a crown jewel, I call my second home, should be on every tourist’s bucket list !

From looking for peace and quiet, solitude to the most thrilling adventures and treks, from buzzing night life meeting like-minded new people turning into life-time friends to taking the road less travelled and finding solace, Ladakh has it all, simply waiting to be re-discovered!

Photo by Iqx Azmi on Pexels.com
Tandi, last fuel station after Manali and before Leh
Pass Rohtang, on the road to Leh
in the middle of nowhere
Lamayuru, also called Moonland of Ladakh

To reach Ladakh, also termed as the land of the high passes, land of mystic lamas, the broken moon-land, the last Shangri-La and the little Tibet, going through some of the highest passes crossing over 7,000 meters above sea-level, in the northern Himalaya ranges. Although it have a few ways to get there namely by air and by road, the journey to Ladakh, primarily Leh, the capital town in the Union Territory, stands at 3500 meters elevation, largest and most second most populous UT of India, was previously also known as Maryul. The journey to Ladakh by road are a few, but the most popular ones would be through Kashmir, a scenic route of course through some of the longest tunnels in India cutting the mountains and going over the Zojila pass currently and the other prominent route taken, also my favourite is through Manali in the state of Himachal Pradesh. This route takes you through some of the highest passes and the most unforgettable valleys, natural landscapes one can see enroute. Surely, will be writing more on that in the following blogs in the future! Let me invest my time here talking about the region of Ladakh and Leh in particular to give you a little hint of it.

Ladakh is spread over 59, 146 kilometre square area Srinagar and Anantnag in the Kashmir valley to the west, Lahaul and Spiti in Himachal Pradesh to the south and Kyrgyzstan visible to the north. In other description it has the Tibet autonomous region to the east, Himachal Pradesh to the south, UT of J&K and Pakistan administered Gilgit Baltistan to the west and south-west corner of Xinjiang across the Karakoram pass in the north, all as per Wikipedia.

Now, having a good idea of its geographical location for one’s curiosity, this blog would try answer some of the most obvious questions people have been searching for currently, apart from the military situation built up in Leh? Well, as per the research done on google and typing the keywords Ladakh for instance, we wanted to dig into some of the basic questions people might have about the region, as being locals there ourselves, thought would shed some light on them!

As we explore into the what, where, how, is and why, we answer some of these as per on the ground per se.

What type of land is Ladakh? Ladakh is a cold desert with majority of the year roughly the winter months of October through March also extending into April when it is cut off on the main highways due to heavy snowfall, but is accessible still by flight. It has Leh and Kargil as its two largest districts with Indus, Shyok and Nubra on the Leh side and Suru, Dras and Zanskar on the Kargil side respectively.

What is Ladakh famous for? Ladakh is famous for its textiles like the pashminas from the Changthang region of Ladakh exported the world over, the long deep valleys, mountain ranges trekking and camping sites like Tsomoriri lake, Stok kangri, Chadar trek on the frozen Zanskar river and Markha valley trek to name a few, the confluence of Indus and Zanskar rivers, highest motorable roads in the world including the Khardungla La pass into Nubra valley, the white water rafting on the Zanskar river, Hemis National Park with many endangered species of animals like the snow leopard huge tourist attractions in the winter, Tibetan-wolf, Eurasian brown bear, red fox, Asiatic Ibex to name a few. Also considered one of the biggest national parks in the country. For the thrill seekers apart from the various adventures, treks in the region, motorcycling to Ladakh from various towns like Delhi or Manali are rather popular. Every season there are dozens of Ladakh motorcycle tour packages being provided, one of the most thrilling experiences indeed!

Is Ladakh safe? Of course, Ladakh is safe for all tourists that incudes any solo travellers too. Though there is always some disturbances on the border but it is far away from the tourist towns and everyone is allowed to move around freely without any problems.

How do I plan a trip to Ladakh? That is simple, get in touch with us on our website and we can help you curate all your travel needs or even provide you with great affordable Ladakh tour packages or you can get in touch with any of the several travel operators in the region.

When are the best months to visit Ladakh? The most ideal months are May through September, that is when the temperature starts really dipping towards winter.

How much does Ladakh trip cost? Cost of your trip will completely depend on your personal needs and preferences, get in touch with us and we can follow up with a questionnaire in order to learn about your needs and preferences.

How do I reach Ladakh? There are a few ways to reach Ladakh, by air, daily flights from Delhi, Jammu, Kashmir. You can even opt for the road via Kashmir or Manali. Both approximately take a couple of days or little over couple of days to reach Ladakh with a night halt at either of the place, but we strongly recommend if you would be looking at a road trip, take your time in reaching Ladakh and not miss the magic in between!

Conclusively, as we delve into the various facets of this beautiful most underrated Shangri-La of India, be sure to learn and hear more about the newest player in the tourism industry in the most promising destinations to come up in the coming years.

introspection, search engine optimization, thoughts, Uncategorized

Keywords in seo

July 28, 2020 rinchenwangchuk Leave a comment

lets try reiterate things about search engine optimization and take it from there, as in branch out to different aspects of it since I truly believe one really needs to dig into the basic well in order to really achieve the deserving results having done all the homework right?

So in order to start thinking about a good seo practice, one needs to start where all brands start, thinking about the audience, the right audience and fetching them where they are instead of thinking that they would come to them having a brilliant product or content for that matter? One really needs to get to their audience that means capture them where

single person or group in a crowd — target audience

they exist online or offline. In order to start thinking about the audience, one must first do all the home work regarding the demographics, psychograhics of the targeted audience. Once you have a good idea about the target audience, one needs to relate to the kinds of questions queries the target audience will be feeding into Google or other search engines?

navigational keywords
informational keywords

The more specifc, descriptive the queries, which means the better the queries judged by the seo expert for the brand or the product or simply the topic one is trying to share, discuss, the better the capture of the target audience! This also means having spent some good quality time researching on the keywords which could be used to make up the content. As described in the previous blogs, keywords could come out of different types such as informative, transactional or just navigational which simply means either informative, looking for some sorta information regarding what he or she might be searching for, which could totally be your product, service or topic for that matter, hence right keywords used by you in your content, transactional simply referes to those users who have already decided on the product and are now most probably buying it, hence a little deeper in the consumer funnel, almost converted, customers for the product and finally navigational keywords which refer to the very specific product the user might be looking for, hence already decided about the brand, price, place etc respectively. Having said that, as long as the user’s intent is captured well by the seo expert regarding the content he or she is dealing in and how well the predicted keywords are along with originality of content, relevance of the content and freshness, all these small small factors will do the trick for the content creator! A little mention of the long tail keywords here is a must, which are useful for the obvious reasons such as being descriptive, detailed, entails more than 3 words, which simply gives the users more broader and useful tool to use in the long run in seo. Keywords then also need to be compared to the competitors on some several parameters like the search volume, difficulty and traffic online. All these are more interesting than just a mention here, as one will discover when you jump into it as it most evidently suddenly opens up a whole new wondow of opportunity to capture your targeted audience. There is no hard and fast rule about the highest search volume of keywords performing the best, instead one should try consider the ones with lessser competition with mid-level traffic and decent search volume. The real importance lies in the users intent and relevancy of the keywords to your kind of whole content. One also needs to look out for keywords stuffing as it only makes sense to use the keywords in a balanced way throughout your content, also watched and identified by Google and other search engines no doubt! The tools used for the keywords are many such as the Google keyword planner which itself suggests more keywords, relative keywords, one can make groups of keywords, save them on different word or excel files for future use for making content. one should go further than that and explore more tools like quora or redditt for content-ideas, simply make use of Google autocomplete search results, Google trends for topics and several other online platforms/application which coulld help in the process? The trick is to use as many resources one can think of when trying to predict the user’s intent, that is the only way to capture them best! I am ceratin there are many tools to use, if one looks for them, ofcourse for a price! Even, wordpress has severeal very useful plugins but for a price, so if someone is wondering about activating all these plugins here, one simply needs to upgrade from basic version like i need to, very soon 😉 I believe that is the only way to really use the platform and take advantage of all the amazing capabilities of the platform like wp!

Having spoken about the hunt and then right use of keywords for your content, ofcourse that does also come with many other facets of seo, in order to optimize the content written for Google in a structured manner, as also mentioned earlier in one of the blogs that is taking care of elements like meta description, h1 tag, social media linking, internal linking to name a few, which I hope to write about as I progress with these blogs, so look out for those 🙂

Happy search engine optimizing! 🙂

#keywords #seo #digitalmarketing #userintent #seogoodpractices #sharingknowledge

search engine optimization

SEO- Some More Learning

July 15, 2020 rinchenwangchuk Leave a comment

Before we talk about seo specifically user intent and keyword research, lets have a look at what one seo-expert ideally needs to look into or be provided with?

Before one really starts working on seo, the expert MUST also work on the targeted audience. This means that one needs to really know the customers like the back of his hand!

I need to stress on the importance of user-intent and the keyword research part in the process of good seo practice. The closer the prediction on what the user will be typing in the search box, the better the ranking on the search engine, hence the better the results on the search engine result pages ( SERPS)! Isn’t that everyone is gunning for afterall?

But before that, lets look at the homework one needs to do in order to reach the user intent and keyword research stages? The seo-expert needs to study the targeted audience in detail, like its done in branding. One would know that in order to know their customers, there are some steps to be followed and NOT to be missed ever? In seo, these are quite the same but with a little difference. According to some references, I have been reading up, one reason simply came across clearly to me, it was to study the roadblocks? That is to say the problems faced by the users, the kind of questions they might post when looking, searching for some product, depending on their intent at the time of searching? Whether the questions posed are exact, direct or somewhat in the region or simply to do some research in order to weigh their options, in which case they would be more informative? Another question to be answered while studying the customers, and this part comes from branding or good market research or strategic market research, would be the demographics of the customers, whether they are males, females, the age groups they belong to, which background do they belong to, in short as mentioned earlier, the demographics and their psychographics- in short their interests and hobbies? Since these topics give a very detailed study if done right, one gets to know their target-customers better? Along with the demographics and psychographics of the customers, one needs to cover related informations such as if a customer is looking for a partcular type of shoes say gym shoes, then what sorta information ( related/complementary information ) the individual could be interested in? All these answers woud lead one to a very detailed picture of the targeted audience! Now, once the audience is clear, one can go ahead with building a relevant seo-strategy and then onto the content-marketing strategy.

When it comes to early non-negotiable steps to seo, although it can be more detailed, but we would be concentratin on the user-intent as mentioned a little earlier in the blog. They could be of two kinds namely commercial intent or informative intent?

The commercial intent would simply refer the exact types of product, including the shape, size, design and brand in mind. here, the user is very clear about what exactly does he or she needs to search for? The customer here is most likely to buy the product.

Some more examples of commerical intent could be the following ;

mountain bikes
new delhi design studio

Informative intent would be primarily for research, when the user maybe wants to do some reasearch and weigh his options. Exampes of informative intent would be namely such as;

best gyms in new delhi
accessories needed for gym
alternate to joining gym

The essential part would be simply that these queries ( what one feeds in the search engines ) as informative questions regarding the roadblock one user might have or even anything related to the same query such as alternate to gyms as given in the example above.

When it comes to keyword research for seo, as far as I have read and read, I feel a keyword is not just about looking for keyword which are most popular with high domain authority ( DA ) and page authority ( PA), which come closest to your niche business, which are popular in your industry, rather one needs to focus now on long tail keywords. Long tail keywrods are simply keywords which would be in more than 3-4 words, a phrase so to speak. This really works! And I also believe it is given its credit by prominent search engines like Google too!

Long tail keywords is something many woud ignore but BELIEVE it or not, it is something which will help one to get better results, also verfied by several articles I have been reading online! I remember this from my uni-days too when I was in my masters program. Anyway, the long tail kewords is ideally 3-4 words or more, a phrase so as to speak. There are reasons for it, and they make perfect sense really. The traditional keywords would be a single word or some semantic word, related, correlated compared to the long tail keywords. In the latter’s case, the group of keywords get more granular, descriptive, hence proving clearly the user’s intent primarily. All thanks to the smart users today! There is also the reason for the major competitiveness on the SERPS. Since when a user is looking for a specifc product, there will be a lot of major brands who are showing on the first page, for the most obvious reasons, with the help of their MULLAH! But, do not get disheartened since one needs to smart about the seo-practice, to believe in the system and follow the process!

Facts about the long-tail keywords compared to the short term keywords or just keywords

low competition
high traffic
high conversion rates

Conclusively, if one seo-fan like myself or an expert, does things the right way, although it is the long-road, one will surely see good results at the end of the process, but it is not to be taken lightly as the practice of SEO is a long-term one and one needs to keep their content- fresh and relevant in order to reap the real benefits along with all the good se practice!

I would explore seo more and more in the future and try share as much as possible.

Cheers for reading!

search engine optimization

Search Engine Optimization

July 10, 2020 rinchenwangchuk Leave a comment

BROADER THOUGHTS ON SEO

The BIG idea behind these blogs would be to share my knowledge/ learnings from my academic and work skills through my personal experiences at home and abroad. It is to strike a conversation with like minded people, collaborate on projectsand contribute contructively towards the industry and the community at large. Having said that, let’s dive in and look at seo from a broader perspective.

man searching on his mobile — Image source: https://bit.ly/2ZcC2aB

Seo is essentially the business of Google and now the various search engines available out there, but one must take care of Google primarily and then Bing! Yes, as much as Google is important for content marketing, one must look at Bing too. Period. Another hard fact for people who would not know is- seo is NOT a short term game, so to speak, it is a long-term game! One needs patience, the right attitude and the belief in the system ( primarily Google and its rules! Yes, there are certain ways of achieving success there). Once you have that in order, it is simply about following and doing it the right way, one will see a steady incremental success in due course.

Search marketing essentially deals with the on-page optimization and off-page optimization. No worries about the terms, jargons, I will look into each and write a blog on each as we progress. So, here I am sorta diving into the on-page optimization part, which essentially involves the seo and the search engine marketing (sem). The seo further involves primarily

Keyword Research
Content development
Page Audit
Link Building
Seo Reporting through Google Analyics (GA) and Google Search Console (GSC)
Web Development
Imaplement Tracking and Verify

Where as the sem involves the following

Keyword Building
Ad-copy build
Launch of the Ad
Seo reporting through again Google Analytics and Google Search Console

One can easily deep dive into all of these broader topics one by one, but be assured each topic can be massive to read and learn and more importantly to apply in real time! I am hoping that I am able to do just that and share and learn from others here. (crossing my fingers 🙂 )

Conclusion

So as one can see, the ethos of Digital Marketing is a complicated web of branches, seo/ search marketing being just one of them. But it is also a fact that content is indeed one of the most vital aspects of Digital Marketing! Few other notable facts I picked up on the way to good seo practices that can make a positive impact on your rankings online would be looking into your site speed, mobile friendliness, on-page optimization as broadly dicussed above and finer details in it like meta description, H1 tag, social media linking, meta tag and internal linking, consistently updating sitemap, requesting indexing on GSC, hosting ofcourse not only on Google but search engine like Bing too and finally a check on your Robots. Txt.

But most importantly as per some research and if I remember correctly from my uni days, when it comes to search marketing it’s about #userintent, right use of keywords, something called #sematicsearch along with rich content, all of which I would explore more in detail and share them here 🙂

#belocalthinkglobal #searchmarketing #shareyourknowledge

Strategic marketing

8 elements for a successful business!

February 13, 2017 rinchenwangchuk Leave a comment

In today’s day and age, making the decision to do business is one thing and having all the resources to run a successful business is another. If you are a start up and have decided t to start a business, it is imperative for you to do your much-needed homework before you even launch your business. To do that, it takes months or even years to set up your business, get all the resources ready to kick in. So, let’s talk a little bit about some of the most vital elements to consider while you start doing your homework!

value proposition
revenue model
market opportunity
competitive environment
competitive advantage
market strategy
organisational management
management team

value

To begin the thought process, Value Proposition is one of the most vital element to ponder upon. What is it that you are offering the end consumers? Does your value proposition really fill the need of the consumers by the end of the day or is it just another firm added to the list of several firms out there serving the same need, in which case it is unlikely that you would survive very long in the cut-throat market where innovation is considered as important as the heart to the human! Your value proposition should be unique or something which fills the untapped need of the consumer somehow, in which case your very first step is good to go!

dollar-sign1

source: https://m.popkey.co/aeda2b/mzOpy.gif

Your revenue model is another important element in the long list of checklists. This simply tries to answer the question of how will the business earn me money? There are several models out there, and you will have to figure which model suits your plan best?There are subscriptions models like the several magazines, online music subscriptions, advertising subscription models like many of the online sites do such as Google where every brand wants to advertise on Google since it is pretty much half the market and avoiding them is avoiding half the search market online, transaction model like several of the e-commerce sites out there, sales revenue model which are followed by the retail stores, affiliate marketing model also known as performance marketing where several brands affiliate themselves to different brands and take leverage, in turn getting traffic and footfalls to their online websites and stores respectively. Conclusively, these are some of the revenue models but the big question is which type of model suits your nature of business, which could even be a mix of two, three of them.

opportunity

Market-Opportunity entails questions like what kind of market sizes exist in the relevant market you are planning to get into? One is have an idea of what kind of market one wants to get into and another is the reality what really exists out there? It is important for the business to know the difference and not jump into your market without any knowledge and without much-needed homework done successfully. It is always better to be realistic and knows the market as it exists today, avoiding all future failures. The market opportunity also entails the existence of some market niche, which is rare to find but a true treasure if found! One should nurture the niche markets and do their due-diligence in order to grow their business in it and more importantly protect their business in the challenging environment of niche markets!

competitive-advantage

Next in line would be the question of competitive environment and competitive advantage? The questions related to these would be namely who else occupies your intended marketspace? This could be direct or indirect competitors in the same environment, also what influences the environment that you could take advantage of and what is it that you can offer to the market space which will be different from what already exists, which makes up for your competitive advantage? The competitive advantage could be thought on different lines such as could you have the first-mover advantage in the market? maybe have some complementary advantages that could be added to the market, giving you an upper hand on that! maybe think of the leverage eg. Amazon had on the online market with its loyalty program for the longest time, its prime membership rewards taking the market by storm and capturing maximum subscriptions. another good example would be Uber, which thinks innovatively, taking a huge chunk of the transportation consumer market with different services suiting all wallet sizes!

focusing_on_strategy_123rf

Market strategy is next which needs to be considerable thought since this could also make or break your business! Question- how do you plan to promote your business in order to attract the right target audience(TA) for your business? it is important to know your TA, to study them as much as possible, so you can target them with customised messages and serve them where they are found, meaning to reach your TA where they reside, the channels they are most fond of and used to? It is important for the business to reach their audience where they reside and not vice-versa. This will make the audience comfortable with the brand and eventually adopt them, turning into loyal customers in the long run, which should be the ultimate aim of every business!

Organisational development involves how the firm’s structure should be set up from the inside in order to carry out the business smoothly? how the firm should organise work on the inside? One could safely say that the organisational development is like the skeleton of the organisation without which there wouldn’t be any framework to its existence! This would also determine the efficiency of the organisation, how well they work on the inside giving optimum results?

The management team involved questions related to the leaders, what kind of backgrounds should the company leaders have? This would determine the leadership strategy, hence impacting the entire labour force in the company for the better or for the worse. The kind of leaders who lead the company would determine if the company will eventually have a strong management team or a weak one! In most cases, the qualities and management styles of the top most leaders are adapted or rather has a trickle down effect to the entire workforce.

Conclusively, these important elements of the business model should be given most importance before launching any business to be successful!

Ecommerce

4 shifts in the E-Commerce platform

February 4, 2017 rinchenwangchuk Leave a comment

I believe the inevitable shift of importance from the business itself given to the consumers today in the business of e-commerce is one which has been predicted for the longest time and rightly been a long overdue as well. there have been several predictions in the e-commerce ethos given by several experts out there in the field but here are some of the things I strongly agree with as time will tell!

It’s very interesting to find out that since the evolution of e-commerce giants like amazon, e-bay and the likes has come to the surface battling it out for their own piece of army(customers) through the most innovative ways to capture their customers’ minds (top of mind awareness), it’s been a rollercoaster for each of the competitors as a financial drain, fight for the most intelligent brains in the market and all in all providing the best and most ideal environment to grow in along with the organizations, all of which starts and ends with $$$.

ecomm_evolution

2. Content is king: content is finally getting its due since its inception or rather since it’s been considered important in the whole picture! thanks to the several algorithm adjustments by Google, it has improved the SERPS, ranking the web pages rightfully according to the relevance, authenticity and authoritative content out there on the web. this has also been good news for any business out there small or medium in attracting the audience and ranking high on the SERPS solely on the basis of its original powerful content! It must also be noted that ranking high in the SERPS doesn’t happen overnight instead takes a long time building its authority and credibility. On the other hand, the bigger organisations will also have to go through the same drill when it comes to SERPS, hence the earlier one starts, the better it is!

digital-marketing-still-content-is-king-or-not-850x445

3. Cashing in on the micro-moments: interestingly enough, though the cash flow in an organization is very vital for the growth of the organization, in today’s e-commerce environment, banking in on the micro-moments experienced by the vast consumers have also started playing an important role in capturing the right audience, eventually also true evangelists for the organization, believe it or not! The moments are simply where the customers are at the time of dispersal of the content, it is most ideal to reach the customers where they are instead of making the customers come to the information (content) which is simply considered a failure of the whole practice which will result in the minimum result 😦 Instead it is vital to reach the customers where they are on whichever channel they might be on? to understand the mood of the customers and bank on that precisely, the more accurate you are, the better you can market! Conclusively, to study the micro-moments of the consumers insightfully and smartly giving the right boost to the growth of the organisation in providing marketing its product or services.

micromoments-vendiagram-v2

4. Consumer fragmentation a challenge and an opportunity: unlike the traditional way of studying consumers, where the traditional organisations used traditional media simply targeting them through print media and television, the consumers today has evolved! Today the market has realised the true importance of the consumers out there, hence making it a real challenge for all brands out there to fight for the same lot of audience! Though the market sounds small, but it is because the preference of the consumers has grown immensely, the consumers have finally started thinking rationally, intelligently about their needs and preferences, and since the organisations and brands have also realised that, it is up to them to capture the audience intelligently too! Hence, the audience has been fragmented by infinite folds, and it is left to the brands and organisations to change the minds of the consumers in their favour through their several innovative ways!

Freemium

Concept of ‘freemium’ case study

January 31, 2017 rinchenwangchuk Leave a comment

pandora_ios

‘Freemium,’ this is just another example of how vast the digital space is today, this one for the audiophiles out there!

Having read the introductory chapters and the case study on Pandora the surprising internet radio, music streaming app and its several competitors like Spotify etc etc, I just wanted to share some thoughts I had on the subject!

Concept of Freemium

It’s interesting to find out how the leading brands in the industry of online music providing services, music streaming did everything they could or rather are doing everything they can in order to sell more and make more bottom line dollar figure? the concept of freemium would probably fit into one of the business models to make that happen, and of course, there have been several of the brands which had evidently done very well and are managing even today very successfully the concept of freemium. Some brands worth mentioning would be the professional networking site Linkedin, online storage site Dropbox to name a few.

The concept of Freemium, when you offer some service online free for a while, post which you intend to enroll the individuals in your paid subscriptions, doesn’t necessarily work everytime as seen through the brand Ning, company dedicated to creating your own network online, at first started with the concept which it failed at, swiftly switching to the paid subscription part, at which it surprisingly succeeded later on. Several of the online music streaming services such as Pandora, Spotify, Apple music have practised the freemium concept to capture audiences across the market.

Does it work for your brand?

Maybe the concept also needs to connect with your brand, the very nature of the offer you are making out there? Some questions certainly need to be looked into, what are the target audience out there, online looking for? what are they talking about in the online forums, communities? how much will the freemium concept connect with your target audience and will they value your offer not only while they have it but even after the trial period has expired? will they enrol in your program in a heartbeat? how can we make that brand really identify with the target audience? As a marketer, I would like to think that the brands wich have really stood out in this case study and concept of Freemium such as Pandora, Dropbox, Linkedin have certainly done their homework even before they got anything out there online, hence the clockwork success which followed, if I may say so, of course, nothing comes without minor setbacks if any at all in the process!

introspection, Uncategorized

Someone once sa…

Quote June 24, 2013 rinchenwangchuk 1 Comment

Someone once said to me,”There are no shortcuts to success.” I for one believe that through all my experiences in life.

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