Check out Ramp Up to get free training to upskill yourself. Here are some information about Ramp Up.

Ramp Up (www.MyRampUp.com) is a free online learning program for developers. We’ve just launched the “Develop Windows Mobile 6 Applications” track. This track, along with the other currently offered ones (eg, SharePoint for Developers, Visual Studio 2008), teaches the important skills in a guided path, making the learning process easier and more efficient. The easy-to-access content (provided by subject-matter gurus) is specifically tailored for the Ramp Up program, and offered in a variety of forms (article, v-lab, codecast and slidecast). Check it out now at www.MyRampUp.com, and see how Ramp Up can help you become more employable by learning important and marketable skills.

Office 2010 has its own website for anyone who wants to know more about what Office 2010 has to offer. They even created a preview video (transformer style) to promote it.

Also for anyone who’s looking into testing the new Office 2010 can sign up for the technical preview. Here’s some explanation about the technical preview

The Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview is a limited, invitation only program which will provide you with the opportunity to experience early, pre-release versions of Office 2010 which will include the following applications:  Word 2010, Excel 2010, Outlook 2010, PowerPoint 2010, OneNote 2010, Access 2010, InfoPath 2010 and Publisher 2010.

By registering you are signing up to be considered for the Technical Preview Program, you will be waitlisted for consideration to be invited into the Technical Preview Program. We will notify invitees in early to mid July.

*image from http://www.jasimages.com/seo.htm

Those of you who is following my blog will know that i am very passionate about digital marketing. I believe that this the future of marketing. Here are some of my insights I learnt about digital marketing.

A key factor in a successful implementation of digital marketing lies in how easy is it for people to locate your webpage. Therefore, the higher your webpage in raking among the search engines ultimately decides how many eyeballs you can attract to your website. The techniques to make your webpage more search friendly is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO normally focus on 2 key areas, PageRank and Keywords. This time around i will focus on Keywords and leave the explanation of PageRank to another post.

To make your post more SEO friendly, here are 5 simple steps that you could make your webpage more visible

#1 Describing your page

Title of your webpage

The first place that Search engines crawls is the title of the webpage.How many times have you seen home page with the title “Home”, “Page 1”, “Products”. This titles tells the search engine nothing about the page. Put something meaningful like “Malaysia’s ABC Electronics – the sole distributor of Zune” rather than “ABC Electronics”

Description

Do the same for the description, make it as detail as possible within 255 characters.

Note: Never put  your title or description with something like this. “Chris Leong’s musings – Anything but porn and sex”. The first thing you must realize is, Google, Live Search or Yahoo are not humans. They don’t understand the meaning of the words, they index by keywords. The last thing you would like to see is that when people search for porn and sex, your webpage will be on the first page.

#2 Tagging your page

Bloggers would know what tagging means, generally they will tag their posting so that users know what the post is about. Same goes for webpage, it is easier for the search engine to know what the pages is about. Tag your page with specific keywords and not general keywords

#3 XML Sitemap

If you want to know more details of a book, sometimes you would browse through the table of contents to get an overall idea of what the webpage is about. Sitemap.XML works the same way. It allows the search engine to know how many pages you have and how deep they should index your page. Make it easier for the search engine to know what you have for them.

#4 Content

Content is king and your content must be updated frequently. Search engine will rank a page with lotsa update better than a page with no updates. Including a blog feature is one of the best way to engage with your readers and improve your search ranking. Many company’s website has already use this model and AirAsia is one of them.

#5 Naming your page, links and images

Search Engine also index your links and images. Therefore, don’t name your image of your post as Image1, or Image2 which does not mean anything. Put a meaningful name to your images so that you can increase the chances of web surfers bumping to your page. Same goes for your page links. If you have a product pages. Don’t name your link as “chrisleong.net/products.asp” give it a more meaningful name like “chrisleong.net/petaling_jaya_digitalcamera_shops”

As you can see, most of the tips here is quite simple. All it takes is some discipline in following it through.

P.S

I’m preparing a blog specially for internet marketing and need a good name for it? Any ideas?

This is not a funny version of “What is Marketing” which i posted earlier. It is a insightful video on how marketing/branding has change throughout the years. Every time there is a disruptive technology (Radio, TV), marketing will evolve.

With the rampant growth of Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and blogs, marketing has begun to change yet again. There are many opportunities for companies to leverage on this viral effect. The best news is, having money does not guarantee success in this new medium.

This level the playing field between startups and large corporations.

Check out the video, I find it insightful and I’m sure you do too.

You learn different things everyday. I just got to know today that you can change the color themes of your MS Office. I really need to spend more time playing around with Office, seems like there are little little things that you just don’t know. I like my office background to be black as it easier to my eyes.

Here’s how you do it

1. Go to Word Options –> color scheme. There are 3 different color schemes for you to choose. Black, Silver and Blue.

Windows 7 RC (Release Candidate) is out, this is the version where no more new features will be added. This is as near as the original that you will get when Windows 7 is out. So try it out. I’m a fan of Windows 7 beta and I’m excited to hear that they made quite some improvements to it.

Some of the things i heard from friends who tried it out are:

1. Faster performance. A friend claim that its 30-40% faster than the beta
2. XP mode which i blog about previously. Now you can use your legacy application in XP mode.

Go download Windows 7 RC it @ http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx. Downloading Windows 7 RC could take a few hours so use a download manager to speed things up. Get Free Download manager for free.

Windows 7 Beta upgrade to RC

For those of you who is using Windows 7 beta, there is no easy direct upgrade from beta to RC. However, there is a workaround and I tried it out and it works. Here are the step to it

• Download the ISO as you did previously and burn the ISO to a DVD.
• Copy the whole image to a storage location you wish to run the upgrade from (a bootable flash drive or a directory on any partition on the machine running the pre-release build).
• Browse to the sources directory.
• Open the file cversion.ini in a text editor like Notepad.
• Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the down-level build. For example, change 7100 to 7000 (pictured below).
• Save the file in place with the same name.
• Run setup like you would normally from this modified copy of the image and the version check will be bypassed.

I got the workaround are from the Windows 7 news

P.S

Before doing the upgrade, you MUST do a backup. Use a free tool by Microsoft call SyncToy to backup your data to an external hard drive.

Buffet and Gates talk a little about Google towards the end of the interview. Near the end (skip to the 6:10 mark of the 2nd video) Fox’s Liz Claman talks about Buffett’s love of Google, quoting him: “Their moat of competitiveness is so wide and what they do is so tough to compare and to compete with that in that moat are sharks and crocodiles that no one can get near.”

Gates fires back, saying that Microsoft is undeterred: “Well, technology companies do for a period get in these wonderful positions and, you know, it’s great that there’s somebody willing to attack those moats. Microsoft is undeterred. We look at each one of those crocodiles and we say charge!”
Buffet responds “No shark wants to come up against him,” and Gates ends with “So, it is, it is a daunting thing, but consumers benefit when somebody’s willing to take that on and say, hey, we can do a better search product.”

Thanks to TechCrunch for the post.