L D Sharma launches affiliate, search engine marketing company
09 April, 2008
L D Sharma, former director of search and affiliate at DGM India, has launched Shoogloo Online Marketing (OnlineMarketing.co.in), an online marketing company that specializes in affiliate marketing and search engine marketing.
According to Shoogloo Online Marketing, the company is already running over 50 affiliate websites like MakeMyTrip.info, BookFlights.co.in and FnP.co.in that cater to specific clients like MakeMyTrip.com, Yatra.com and FernsNPetals.com respectively.
“We are doing excellent job in affiliate marketing and in April 2008, we hope to achieve a target of giving more than 20,000 transactions to our various clients and in six months, we hope to generate 100,000 transactions to various clients in pure CPA (cost per action) basis,” L D Sharma, founder and managing director, Shoogloo Online Marketing, has said, adding, “Our target is to create 200 affiliate websites by the end of this year.”
All the Best LD. Affiliate Marketing can sure pick up in India and I am sure you will keep DGM & the other agencies on their toes. Keep it up.
Why is everybody behind LD's life ???
Alootechie-please have some meaningful posts.In case whatever LD does needs to be published,why not create a new website and keeping publishing his daily stories
How about a LD-KI-KAHANI.COM ? Sorry you may not even get that since like he has pre-booked thousands of domains,that may have been taken too :-)
Dear Dear
I must say, I work largely in the US market, but I was very intrigued with all this news on Indian Affiliate scene. LD seems to be a butt of many a jokes and a set of loyal supporters under the names of Bhupinder Tomar and Om Prakash. They always come up with interesting & sentimental stories about LD's past? Business is run on logic & rational and not on sentiments.
Also, a little bird tells me that LD has had a very poor track record of employment and has had many an acrimonius and unsuccessful exits from his companies in the past - Indiatimes, failed affiliate business in UK also under the name of Shoogloo, DGM India and now a network.
Why would an affiliate want to be a network perhaps he understands the best. Will be interesting to see what all he can do....
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After visiting the sites named in the article and going through the company's web site and also considering the revenue figure given by LD Sharma as one of the comments here all I can say is "why the hell it did not occur to me?".
I think its a cool idea and highly ignored space to be in with dedicated focus unlike others who just plug in the affiliate programs wherever and wait for it to drive conversions.
Most of us may not because we don't understand but all the performance based advertisers would love to be a part of such an aggressive dedicated affiliate program and with right approach LD Sharma is surely going to make it to their super affiliate list and may be remains the only one.
Affiliate programs is one of the MOST Powerful forms of online promotion available to any product owner and if the focus is right then they will be happy paying the higher commissions.
In fact as I see then lots of publishers in this category should take a proactive participation in letting such affiliates know in advance about new product or scheme launches enabling them to drive conversions. They should also provide lot of collateral material to affiliate that they can post along with affiliation links to drive traffic and conversions. Plugging in bonuses and freebies would be nice.
The focused CPA marketing is definitely better than shortsighted CPL marketing where in you just make people fill in a form and sell it to all the players in that space.
On-line marketing ( affiliate marketing included) is still a raw market that too for a place like India. The role of affiliates, publishers and networks is still not valued, because of the lack of numbers , so far. There are bound to be over-reactions to new ventures and deals struck by individuals, moreso for the ignorance and lack of foresightedness by the critics. How LD succeeds will depend not so much on what is being said about his persona..but on what he is able to achieve in this nascent space.
I wish LD, the effervescent quick learner and "risk-taker" all success in this new venture. How I wish he could use his skills to make a brand new proposition for affilates using the mobile network.
I'll be watching this space till then.
Best wishes
Om
Dears,
LD recently pointed out this article to me in our online chats and I was a bit taken back at some of the hostility shown here on the comments section.
This reply is to provide a critique to some of the points raised by previous "anonymous" authors on this page. As far as I can see there seems to be three main issues taken with LD and his initiatives.
1. Imitation
2. Cyber squatting
3. Value creation
Let me enlighten these "anonymous" authors on some basic facts about business, markets and economy.
First the issue of imitation.
Anyone who has bothered to study even a bit of economic history will realise that most businesses, economies and markets take imitation very seriously. Innovators are not always paid for their break through in a competitive market economy. Japanese reversed engineered cars to create Toyota and Nissan. Koreans learnt the trick from Japanese and created Samsung, LG and Daewoo. Most of the Windows already existed in apple software but Bill gates went on to make billions. Even the graphics in Windows were imitated from Apple. Closer home Airtel has its roots in a company that made cheap telephone handsets for a living before dreaming big. The whole software industry in India has its roots in cheap low cost imitations of software products available in the developed economies.
The issue is not imitation, the issue more is if the imitation creates value in a economy and in an competitive economy LD does not need your or mine endorsement, he has market forces telling him if his imitation is indeed cheap or will it be rewarded for taking business risk with a imitation model.
If you want my bet, I think LD is on to something with his imitation model. Successful business take proven models, copy them, make them their own and then find new markets for them, in the process making their own money. If you are afraid of imitation (or find it cheap) my suggestion is that either you should shift to Mars or stop being a consumer, because every thing you own is a cheap imitation of something once original.
Secondly, LD has been labelled a successful "cyber squatter". Now here is a lesson for those of you who do not understand the concept of "property rights". A capital economy runs on property rights. Property rights, in modern economies, are created and protected under a legal framework. Historically they were protected by force (read tons of literature on colonialism, American conquest of the Indian land etc) but now we have become more sophisticated and use legal means to acquire property rights. There are legal mechanisms in place for cyber squatters to be challenged and be deprived of their ill gotten access to property rights. However to label LD a mere squatter is bit of a act in self parody. He saw an opportunity before others, with in a given legal framework, used legal transactions to buy certain rights and is now using his access to those rights to make his own working capital.
Lastly, I read above a lot of grumbling on how LD should create something of value and stop making money from cheap imitation and cyber squatting. He has already given evidence of his business volume and that should shut up some of you - NEWS FLASH - if people want to pay for his imitation and cyber squatting, then be happy people, we have a market economy working here. As for value creation, besides the obvious value creation of business for himself, here are few more for you to consider. Every time a entrepreneur (which even the worst critics of his would not deny him that title) creates a sustainable business model, he provides input to deepening out markets and economy. Beside providing employment to people it creates a value in various business transactions in the economy (for those who have not yet understood, modern societies are built around transactions and wealth creation on each transaction, hopefully with lowering the cost of transaction itself).
Before I finish this reply, let me also take issues with some personal comments on himself as an individual, by linking his short nature of employment and being a "joker" etc. LD was born in small village in Himachal where even now you walk about 25 kilometres (in a mountainous terrain) to go to your high school. He has managed to go from there to make his way into the hurly burly of modern world competing with people like (fortunate enough to go to privileged public schools that landed us in best b-schools and then to best world universities) me on equal footing. Learning by mistakes and not being deterred by failures (oh yes, if you do not know, he has had to start his professional life quite a few times afresh from his risky ventures) of taking risk.
If taking risk and maintaining a motivation to succeed in life is to be "joker", I wish we had more of them around us.
We can do with it, given our state of endemic economic poverty in most of rural India.
Good luck LD, you do some of us proud.
Bhupinder
The comments below are exactly what I was referring to in my observation on 'Online Brand Reputation' by Sachin. You may read it at http://www.alootechie.net/?q=node/394.
On a different note, the site (www.onlinemarketing.co.in) can do with a lot of improvements in terms of D&D, layout, usability etc. I'll touch base with LD directly for this ;-)
First of all congratulation Mr. Sharma.
All Anonymous persons this is showing your jealously and cheap level. You should be respectful to LD sharma who is doing a great work. If someone is capable to doing that all stuffs you should have to appreciate his work....... and this is not a joke....
Think about yourself what you did in your past..... He is achieving everything.. not you... he is getting famous... not you.... he is one of the leading online marketer... not you... thats why you are feeling so jealous of his success......
and LD keep it up........ do your work...... and best of luck for the future......
I think it is unfair to have comments like LD is joker,cheap stuff or so an and so fourth, I think the way he has grown from working as simple account manager in oswal to director DGM, its great achievement. I met LD in UK in of the electronics store,he was with his boss, I never believed that he would be doing what he was claiming to be,but I am now a great fan of him.
Even thinking of investing in his venture.Please bear in mind I meet hundred of entrepreneurs like LD,across the Globe.
thanks
Raju Moza
Its a great push to see a new affiliate marketing company generating 20,000 transactions per month.
Though for people i beg to differ that DGM and LD's new venture is same. I do feel both have different model for transaction generation. In LD's venture dependency on other publishers for generation of transaction is lesser which i really like about his approach to affilate marketing.
It will be great to see how this model evolve further as more and more advertisers start to push for CPA model. Inventory levels are not going up so intelligent ways of optimizing inventory will surely make difference.
Best of luck to L.D for his new venture.
Dear All Anonymous,
First of all, please first have the courtesy of writing your names rather than writing Anonymous comments. You should be aware of the fact that it does not take more than 5 minutes to know who you are, which IP address you are writing from, which email ID you used, which system you used etc etc.. Comments like bribing etc are really very cheap...
You should respect the facts that if we are generating 20,000 transactions, why dont you confirm these figures from dgm or other partners mentioned in the post and even if we take a CPA of Rs. 100/, that means we are doing around 20L per month billing just in a short span of time.
I did not leave dgm in 6 months, and i am associated with dgm for long now. For this particular stint, I worked for complete 1 year.
You will hear about our more good things soon... In case anyone has any questions, you may like to write to me at LD@OnlineMarketing.co.in.
Thanks,
LD Sharma
LD, when will u start doing some quality work. Replicating UK sites, leaving cos. in short span of times, what's all this. You were not like this in Indiatimes, now you own a co. people might join you (After writing an essay in not more than 500 words as to how you could add value to Shoogloo Online Marketing. http://onlinemarketing.co.in/career.html) they will only respect you, if u do some original work. I wonder how come Alootechie is writing so much of you, did u bribed Rajesh???
Another gimmick by the most qualified cyber sqatter in India....why did LD leave DMG?.he had only joined it 6 months ago..
Dear LD,
it's a great news, keep it up.
Hi LD,
Glad to hear this news. All the best LD.
Manish Parkar
One more to join the clutter!!!
Can someone explain WHY ? And are you really hopeful of making some money in
this space?
You kidding, aren't you?
Nikhil
LD Sir,
Isn't the cheap replica of moneysupermarket.com (moneysupermarket.co.in) yours? I am sure you could have thought something better.
hi..sir
rohit prasher
i m big fan of yours. May your all wishes come true early.
thanks!
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