MAD MIND STUDIOS

10 Great Places to Find Graphic Design Jobs

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 06:00:07 PDT

If you are a graphic designer looking for freelance graphic design jobs or full-time graphic design jobs then you have come to the right place. Below is a list of 10 great places to find graphic design jobs. Most of these sites will also be extremely useful for other creatives such as web designers, animators and illustrators.

What if I’m not looking for a job yet?

One of the best things you can do is research jobs you might be interested in for the future. If you don’t know what is expected of you, how will you ever be able to land your dream job? Keep an eye on these sites and look around from time to time to see what jobs appeal to you.

Write down what the requirements are such as technical skills and years of experience so you can prepare yourself better. You will be surprised at how much is expected of graphic designers.

Top Ten Websites to Find Graphic Design Jobs

1. Coroflot

Corflot hosts over 80,000 graphic design portfolios and currently has over 700 job listings. Jobs are organized into a variety of design related categories. You can even subscribe to their job listing rss feed and get personalized job alerts!

2. Behance

The Behance job board is new, but growing fast so be sure to check their listings before the competition gets even rougher! I’ve seen some hidden gems hiding in their graphic design job board.

3. Authentic Jobs

Authentic jobs lists hot new graphic design jobs every week, both full-time and part-time.

4. AIGA Design Jobs

The AIGA’s reputation speaks for itself and its design jobs section is a great place to find some amazing job opportunities. Many large and well respected companies look for new and or experienced designers here.

5. Krop

Krop is one of the largest and most well known websites to find graphic design jobs. It has been around for a long time and new jobs are listed often by top agencies and design studios.

6. design:related

design:related showcases many great listings, including design management jobs, interactive jobs and many other design jobs requiring varying experience.

7. Freelance Switch

The job board over at freelance switch is another growing job listings website that has a variety of design, development, illustration and flash jobs.

8. Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine a large design related blog, also has a job board with design and development jobs. The listings are organized into full-time and freelance positions for easier navigation.

9. Fresh Web Jobs

Fresh Web Jobs tends to lean more towards web design related jobs, but there are jobs for graphic designers on this site and you don’t want to miss any listings!

10. Simply Hired

Simply Hired is a great site to check because it shows design job listings from many different websites. It also has filter options so you can easily weed out listings that do not appeal to you.

Top 50 Graphic Design Blogs

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 06:00:04 PDT

PR 7 blogs

Design Observer: writings about design & culture

Smashing Magazine – a weblog dedicated to web-developers and designers

Core77 / design magazine + resource /

PR 6 blogs

Authentic Boredom – by graphic designer, Cameron Moll

Coudal Partners: a forum for creativity and experimentation

CR Blog – News and views on visual communications from the writers of Creative Review

Design Notes published by Michael Surtees who tries to see life filtered through design as opposed to placing design on a pedestal

Dexigner – popular design portal featuring the latest design news

Hicksdesign – Journal of a small creative agency based in Witney, Oxfordshire, UK, authored by Jon Hicks

I Love Typography, devoted to fonts, typefaces and all things typographical.

Mark Boulton: Design Thinking. Web Delivery. By a designer based in Cardiff, UK.

Quipsologies – Corralling the most relevant and creative on- and off-line bits that pertain to the design community.

Randa Clay Design – Design, Marketing, Blogging, Branding and all things Creative

Russell Davies – incredibly diverse UK-based blog on topics associated with design

Speak Up > Design Dialog

Subtraction 7.0 – NYTimes.com’s Design Director, Khoi Vinh, blogs about design and other relevant info.

swissmiss – tina roth eisenberg | swiss designer gone nyc

Typographica. A Journal of Typography.

Veer: The Skinny – provides visual elements for use in professional creative work

Veerle’s blog 2.0 – Webdesign – XHTML CSS | Graphic Design

You the Designer – Graphic Design Blog

PR 5 blogs

Logo Design Love: a website dedicated to all things logo.

Ace Jet 170 – Found type, print and stuff

AisleOne – Design, typography and everything else.

Anamorphosis. learn design create

Be A Design Group – a blog for graphic designers, created in March of 2004 by Adrian Hanft and Bennett Holzworth.

Chris Glass, The Last 10 Days. A creative fella’s journal from Ohio.

Creative Curio – Learn, discuss and explore the realm of graphic design.

Designers who Blog – features blogs discussing graphic design, web design, illustration, marketing, photography, branding, writing and advertising

Design Adaptations | Charity Ondriezek

Design is Kinky – a proudly Australian blog on design

Design Sojourn | Strategic Industrial Design Blog

DesignM.ag — Articles and Resources for Web Designers

Design View: Articles, Essays and Opinions by Andy Rutledge

Elite By Design a freelance and web design community website

Fuel Your Creativity – Find your spark

Grain Edit – covers contemporary graphic design / illustration, as well as design from the from the golden era of advertising (1950s–1970s).

Graphic Define Magazine – focuses on the business of running a graphic, interactive, or web design studio.

ideasonideas, a blog that invites dialogue on issues relevant to communication designers and brand strategists

Inspiration Bit – Get inspired and learn from the latest technology, art and design buzz on the Web.

Inspiredology – covers everything that inspires us.

ISO50 – The Visual Work of Scott Hansen

Jasongraphix :: A journal of art, thoughts, and projects by Jason Beaird

Noisy Decent Graphics by Ben Terrett, a Graphic Designer in London

Positive Space :: The Graphic Design Blog

Spoon Graphics – the personal project of Chris Spooner, a UK based Graphic / Web Designer.

Swiss Legacy – Graphic design and typography

The Dieline – packaging design blog

The Serif – Your daily dose of design inspiration

things to look at – plenty of images, and oddly, things to look at

Numbers 51 and upwards

PR 5 blogs continued

Type for you. A blog on typography, by Pedro Serrão, a graphic designer from Porto, Portugal.

TypeNeu dedicated to typography, fonts, lettering and typefaces

PR 4 blogs

AdGoodness – advertising and design blog from Frederik Samuel

Andy Budd :: Blogography – based in Brighton, England

BittBox – Homemade vector freebies, design tips, tutorials and bitts.

Computerlove – Connecting Creative Talents

creativebits | Apple orientated design community (must register to comment)

David the Designer – don’t underestimate the knowledge this man has acquired (and don’t call him Dave)

Elliot Swan survived three days without the internet

FormFiftyFive – Design Inspiration – the pet project of designers Glenn Garriock and Jack Daly

graphicPUSH – “a sporadically but faithfully updated design blog”

Graphic Design Blog – graphic design, freelancing, illustration, advertising, web design

Laughing Lion Design : Web, Graphic Design & Illustration Ireland

Lealea Design: Blogblog: Design inspiration and introspection

Luz Cannon: The Work of David Brooks : Designer, Photographer and Audio Producer

NOTCOT.ORG – for your ideas + aesthetics + amusement.

SeptemberIndustry | a showcase of the best in international graphic design

SonSpring | Journal by Nathan Smith

Swiss Cheese and Bullets by Daniel Gray

We Made This (It’s Our Blog)

Your Brain on Design: A Graphic Design Blog | Leslie Tane Design

PR 3 blogs

CrazyLeaf Design Blog – Web Design and Graphic Design Blog

Creative Guy – tips, tricks, tutorials and discussion about Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator for designers running Mac OSX

Designer Daily graphic design inspiration and resources

Gazelle Creative – by Elizabeth Jackson (a.k.a. Zabs)

gradient dropshadow curve – by Henry Tapia

Just Creative Design – personal blog of Jacob Cass, a graphic designer in Australia

Outlaw Design Blog – A Graphic Design Blog

Reflections – the personal blog of Paul Enderson, a freelance web and graphic designer from England

Truly Ace – Graphic Design Blog

10 Famous Graphic Designers

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:44:24 PDT

Here’s what I found out -

1. Giambattista Bodoni – 1740-1813- He started with printmaking but is most known for designing and engraving typefaces. You might recognize the typeface Bodoni.

2. Neville Brody – He started in record cover design but became well known as the Art Director for Face Magazine, and typefaces.

3. David Carson – Known as the “Father of Grunge“. He became famous by breaking all the rules of Graphic Design and developing his own signature style.

4. William Caslon – 1692-1766 – Caslon started out as an engraver of gun locks and barrels, and as a bookbinder’s tool cutter but is known for his typefaces.

5. Milton Glaser – He is best known for his “I Love New York” logo. He is also the founder of New York Magazine.

6. Jonathan Ive – He is internationally renowned as the principal designer of the iMac. He is considered one of the best in industrial design.

7. Aldus Manutius - 1449-1515 – Started as a printer and publisher but famous for inventing italic type.

8. William Morris – 1834-1896 – Morris was an architect, poet, textile designer, and writer, but was most famous for designing unique wallpaper. He also developed typefaces.

9. Wally Olins – He is mostly known for his experience incorporate identity and branding.

10. Heather Montgomery – She is the CEO of Forward Motion Studios, a Santa Rosa web design firm. She is known for her wine label and business card designs. She also designs couture jewelry that is amazing!

Graphic Design Portfolio Sites

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:43:46 PDT

It is very important to promote yourself and your work and you need to know where to do that. The list bellow is very useful as it shows you where to submit your designs so people can notice your art work. By submitting to these websites you will gain exposure and if people like your designs willÂ want to hire you.

1.Â Coroflot.com

A very cool website with a lot of great portfolios, if you update yours often you will have more views.

2. Behance.net

A network with lots of great designers and portfolios where you can make a lot of connections.

3. Deviantart.com

Is there anything else to say?

4. Styleportfolios.com

If you are fashion designer this is the place where to show your work.

5. Creativebinge.com

A cool creative community website, small, but is growing.

6. Designtaxi.com

Portfolios, news, jobs and more on this nice website.

7. Creativeshake.com

You will get a free portfolio and a lot of jobs to apply.

8. Cpluv.com

Connect with other artist and promote yourself.

9. Postbidwin.com

Post a free portfolio and then apply for jobs, simple as that.

10. Flickr.com

The simplest way to show off your work are websites like Flickr. This is an example there are many services out there like this one.

I hope you enjoyed this list, if you know any other website like the ones I presented please let me know.

The Importance of Social Media Marketing

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 06:00:11 PDT

The Value of Marketing Through Social News Websites

Image Credit: Poster Web 2.0

For those who don’t understand or see the value of social media websites, let’s take a look at the benefits of creating viral content and effectively promoting them through social media channels.

Developing link baits and successfully getting it popular on various social media websites like Digg and StumbleUpon will lead to multiple benefits for any website:

Primary and Secondary Traffic. Primary traffic is the large amount of visitors who come directly from social media websites. Secondary traffic is referral traffic from websites which link to and send you visitors, after they come across your content through the social sites.

High Quality Links. Becoming popular on social news websites like Digg or Reddit will get you a large number of links, some of which may be topically relevant, some not. A good story can realistically acquire a large number of high quality editorial links, most of which cannot be easily bought.

Now let’s translate this into tangible benefits for your website:

1. Links = Better Search Engine Rankings.

When a website receives a large number of natural, permanent links from trusted domains, it develops authority. Search engines trust it. If you optimize your linkbait and website structure properly, you can easily start ranking for competitive keywords, which will in turn bring in search engine visitors.

Do this often enough and your search traffic will undoubtedly increase. In a sense, you are obtaining these quality links through borrowed trust. Many bloggers and webmaster still think that if an article is on the Digg or del.icio.us homepage, then it’s probably worth checking out and referencing through a citation link.

A new website may find it difficult to gain links from a critical mass that is not familiar with it but a trusted social news resource makes it easier for links to come in, because the community and buzz has somewhat ‘certified‘ the value of the site. Note that the actual strength of the article is still of utmost importance for all.

2. Primary + Secondary Traffic = Community/Supporters.

Some people claim that social news websites only send useless traffic, visitors that will often just view a specific webpage and click away. Yes, that’s usually the case. Sites like Digg are notorious for their poor bounce rates: many visitors drop in for the article and then leave after reading it.StumbleUpon is much better in this aspect.

But don’t mistake this with a lack of interest. Your subscriber figures will often take big jump up and then stabilize after a few days. If your entire site is relevant to the general interests of the social media website, there will always be a handful of social users who will start to track your site in order to submit future content.

Detractors also ignore the power of ultra targeted secondary traffic. General sites or blogs in the same niche will link to a story that’s popular on social sites, because it adds value for their readers or users. This is done naturally on a daily basis for many.

While primary traffic usually comes in a larger volume, I would argue that secondary traffic is more valuable. Why? Because links from other websites bring visitors who are very likely to be interested in your content. These citation links demonstrate recognition of your site in the eyes of others. It builds your brand.

Think of the social news site as a platform or a soapbox. As something that gives you a chance to be heard or read, even for a brief moment of a few hours. The people who are drawn to your message will visit your site and recommend it to others.

Four Reasons to Practice Social Media Marketing

Image Credit: Poster Web 2.0

Why bother exploring social media as a marketing channel for your website or business? After all, you could stick to link exchanges, search advertising or the purchase of banner and editorial ads on relevant sites.

Here are some reasons why you should consider using social media:

It’s natural. Not only do you get natural links without any discernible pattern, your website is exposed to large groups of people in a spontaneous fashion. This differs from paid advertising which has overt commercial overtones.

It’s defensible. Once successfully mastered, social communities can be a great source of web traffic on top of any traffic you are already receiving from search engines. While you can’t easily increase your search engine traffic, social media traffic can be very easily controlled through strategic marketing.

It’s low-cost/high returns. If done by yourself, costs are limited to only time and perhaps the expenses involved in hiring a freelance programmer/designer. The benefits will often exceed the cost. It would take you thousands of dollars to buy many links; social media has the ability to give you that for free.

It complements other efforts. Social media optimization and marketing is usually community-specific. It doesn’t interfere with any other methods of getting traffic to your website. It can and will fit perfectly with an advertising campaign targeting other websites or search engines.

So How Does Social Media Help Me to Make Money?

It doesn’t. At least not directly. Every site or business that wants to expand and become profitable, needs a core group of supporters who will be willing to make purchases or recommend the site to others. Your site needs to perpetuate itself.

The more supporters you have, the faster word spreads about your site. Social media marketing is an excellent way to get people to come into your site to take a look at at what you have to offer. You will grow when there are a group of loyal visitors ready to always act upon what you have to offer.

Because social media websites can be leveraged for links and better search rankings, they can greatly increase your site’s income potential. For example, you will be able to price ads higher or generate revenue from any paid business models.

Source: Click Here

How To Set Up Google Adsense On Your Website!

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:39:30 PDT

Creating an Abstract Watercolor Wallpaper

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:27:50 PDT

Creating an Abstract Watercolor Wallpaper

There are plenty of ways to create a Watercolor Effect in Photoshop. Some are very cheesy and you can easily tell that a simple filter has been used. In this tutorial, we will be using Layer Masking. It is one of the most fascinating and powerful Photoshop method, to use layer masks in your designs.

Preview of Final Image

Let us start off by creating a canvas of 1920X1200 pixels, in RGB mode. I found a picture of Jim Morrison (you can obviously use any of your favourite characters, or your own picture for that matter). I found the picture here. Copy and paste the image into our canvas. Use transform and scale it to fit our canvas by holding down the Shift-Key. This keeps the original aspect ratio of the image and it does not look stretched.

Even though the picture I am using here is a small resolution one, it will not matter much since I will be using some filters that will remove any sort of pixelation. Adjust Brightness/Contrast and then duplicate the layer.

Apply Watercolor filter from filter gallery to the duplicated layer. Name this duplicated layer as "Watercolor Filter".

Select the original layer and NOT the "Watercolor Filter". Go to Image > Adjustments > Threshold. Name this original layer as "Threshold Effect".

Set the Blending mode to Multiply, and merge both, "Watercolor Filter" and "Threshold Effect" layers. So, we now have a "Merged Layer".

Now open some images I took from the Media Militia Sampler Pack, download it here.

Get to the "Merged Layer". Select and copy the image into the layer. Add a Layer Mask to "Layer 1". Alt + click on the layer mask, and you will see the canvas is in white. Paste the image here, and Ctrl + I to invert the colors. This way, the layer mask hides the Blacks, and reveals the Whites. Click back onto the layer and we can see our image.

Use some paper textures from Bashcorpo, you’ll find it here. Set it to Linear Burn mode.

Clone some areas in the "Layer 1" using the Clone Tool. This makes the image look more complete.

Finaly, add some more watercolor splashes from the Media Militia Sample and add a fancy text, oriented like what I have in this image below. Now you have an abstract watercolor design. You can use your creativity and innovate more on this effect. Hope you had fun in this tutorial!

Source: Click Here

FREE GRUNGE VECTOR ART

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

FREE GRUNGE VECTOR ART
1. 50 Free Vector Grunge Corners
This incredible vector grunge borders download is way better then any grunge brushes out there. Since its vectorized they can be scaled as large or as small as you want!
2. Go Media’s Sample Vector Pack #2
Go Media is well known for its incredible vector packs and also their generous free sample packs such as this great sample grunge vector pack that has skulls, a crown, a spider, weapons and all other kinds of cool grunge looking vectors.
3. Ben Blogged Skulls
This is one of the best grunge skull downloads around, where the grunge skulls come with wings, paint splatters, arrows and other cool grunge design elements.
4. Wicked vector skull illustration
This is a great sick skull vector that also includes many other reusable vector art elements.
5. City of Angels vector illustration
This cool grunge looking city of angels would make a great background for a piece of artwork and has a lot of pieces in it that can be mixed and matched.
6. Floral Grunge II
A cool floral grunge design that can be used for borders or as part of a bigger design.
7. Grunge Banner
A high quality grunge banner that you can add any text into.
8. Grunge Set 2
A cool grunge set that has splatters and other grunge looking marks.
9. Fear Grunge Vector Illustration
Sick grunge skull vector illustration with other swirls and lines in it that makes for an awesome background.
10. Free Vector Grunge Splats
A pack of quality vector grunge splats and brush marks that can be scaled to any size.

The most popular social sharing options on the top blogs

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

Most blogs encourage sharing of their content on services like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and so on, usually via prominent buttons in connection with each post.

It’s a win-win situation for the bloggers and their readers. The bloggers make it easy for their readers to share content they like, and by sharing, readers drive more traffic to the blogs.

A ton of social sharing options are out there, but which ones are bloggers relying on the most? That’s what you’ll find out here below.

Examining share button usage

To get an idea of how common the various social sharing options are we went through theTechnorati top 100 blogs and examined what kind of share buttons they are using. Too keep the scope of this survey within reason, we focused on the more common options out there.

We looked at dedicated, visible buttons for sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious and Google Buzz.

To clarify, with “dedicated buttons” we mean standalone buttons (or in a few cases, prominent text links) that are included in connection with each post on a blog, not options included in some general “share this” popup, like the widgets provided by AddThis and ShareThis. However, since a general share option is so common, we included that as its own button category in the statistics.

Share button usage among the top 100 blogs

So let’s get right to the results. First, here is a chart showing a summary of the results of our survey (the number of blogs using the different social sharing options):

Above: Dedicated, standalone buttons/options for sharing on the top 100 blogs. Note that the “general share option” usually contains many more share options, including several not listed here.

Quick observations on share button usage

Here are some of our observations on share button usage among the top blogs.

Both Twitter and Facebook buttons are now more common that Digg buttons. Digg is no longer the king of social sharing, at least as far as these 100 blogs are concerned.
Twitter is the most common share button. Two thirds of the top 100 blogs have a dedicated “share on Twitter” option.
A Facebook share button is present on 58 of the top 100 blogs. In most cases, it’s coupled with a Twitter button.
Digg buttons are present on just under half of the top 100 blogs. While we don’t know what this looked like a couple of years ago, an educated guess is that this used to be a higher number.
Digg buttons are twice as common as Reddit or StumbleUpon buttons.
58 of the top 100 blogs include a general, expandable share this button; 19 of those blogs have no other share buttons.
Dedicated MySpace and LinkedIn share buttons are rare, but they do show up in some of the blogs. We didn’t include them in this survey, though.
6 of the top 100 blogs have no sharing options at all.
Email buttons are very common. We didn’t include “email this article” buttons since we focused on share options connected to specific services (like Digg and Twitter), but they were actually more common than we thought they would be. Had we included them, they would have been among the top sharing options.
The war of the Buzzes. The “other” Buzz, the Digg clone from Yahoo, is currently a much more popular share option than Google Buzz, which only showed up on six blogs.

That last point leads us to an interesting question…

Google Buzz, a flop with bloggers?

As you can see in the chart above, Google Buzz hasn’t made much of an impact on bloggers so far, at least not enough for them to integrate a Google Buzz share button with their posts. It’s of course still early days for Google’s new social media tool, so this may change significantly over the coming year.

Perhaps part of the reason is that there is no official Google Buzz share button. Instead, bloggers have started to make their own.

Here below are the “third-party” Buzz share buttons we found when going through the top 100 blogs. We’re sure there are other variations out there as well.

Above: Google Buzz buttons we found. The two farthest to the left are from Mashable. Others are from, in order from left to right, The Next Web, GigaOM (and Engadget), Business Insider, andTechCrunch.

It remains to be seen if Google will release an official button down the line. Perhaps they won’t. After all, Twitter doesn’t have an official share button either, and that hasn’t stopped them from becoming the most popular sharing option out there. All it takes is some third party to step up and provide one, like Tweetmeme did for Twitter.

Source: Click Here

Website Planning

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

Knowing what you want is the only way to knowing what you need.

Before even considering the practical aspects of creating a website, there are some important fundamental things that need to be decided upon first. For example, who exactly is this website for anyway? Who's the target audience? What information needs to be included, and how should that information be structured, etc, etc?

The fact is, the more planning & preparation you do, the easier it is to make informed decisions on technological or design issues; like deciding the best way for the 'visitor' to navigate your website or choosing the right hosting package.

Another advantage of thorough planning comes when you bring in the professionals; you can save a great deal of time and money by having everything ready and in place for them.

Main Aims:

First, you need to consider the central aims of your website and what approach is needed to best translate those aims.

A few examples of the kind of things you might want to answer. Not a definitive list!

Again, who is the website for?
What media is best suited to carry the information, e.g. does it require sound or moving images?
Is it primarily an 'information point' about your organisation that you can refer people to?
Is it primarily educational?
How visually exciting does it need to be to be effective?
Should it be serious or light?
Are you trying to raise money or sell something?
What conventions should the website follow, if any?
Does it need to be a interactive, two-way application?
What overall 'image' of you organisation do you wish your website to convey?

Site Content & Information Structure

Having established the basic aims of your website, you need now to consider how the content (text, images, etc) should be organised and structured. These considerations will of course at some point need to take account of the type of web technologies you might want to make use of - See Web Technologies. But to start with it is a good idea to try and find websites with similar aims to yours, to see how they've designed and organised their content. What have they done well and what have they done that could be improved upon?

Probably the most important aspect of website 'structural design' is how you breakdown the content into logical sections (Main Areas, Pages, Headers, Sub-Headers, Lists, etc). As a general rule, things should be kept short and sweet. You need to create a strong hierarchy for the site and breakdown content into small units.

It is a good idea to create a graphical schema/flowchart/sitemap for the site. This can help you visualise a logical hierarchy, and to see how easily information will be accessed. It will also help others to understand how your website is structured.

Generic Sitemap, Site Schema:

Navigation And 'Usability'

The modern website can now include a whole spectrum of functionality and application usages. Think of web applications like Facebook, Google Maps, Flickr, and YouTube. As the complexity of a website increases, so does the importance of its 'usability'. Usability, as the name suggests, is the attention paid to how easy or not, a website is to use.

The usability of a website may sound simple and obvious, but it needs to be kept under constant consideration as part of your planning. You never want the situation where your visitor's are thinking "okay, so what do I do now?"

A major aspect of usability for a website is the need for people to be able to find what they want, and quickly. Logical, practical and sensible Navigation is essential if your site is to succeed.

Present clear, consistent, well-ordered Navigation (main menus, primary links to pages), and include Sub-Navigation if necessary. Include Search facilities too if you have a large site that include forums, blogs etc.

Conventional Primary and Sub-Navigation Layout:

Within individual pages, separate content further using lots of headers, sub headers, lists, short paragraphs, etc. Try to make the hierarchy explicit using colour schemes, icons, font sizes, spacing, etc. Try to avoid overly long scrolling pages (like this one).

Finally, include lots of context based links (links within text) to other pages on your site, cross referencing is something the web is particularly good at.

Writing For The Web

It needs to be remembered that the web is different from other communication media. So it is not recommended for example, that you just transfer existing print media unedited, directly to the web. Website pages or 'areas' need to be self-contained to a large extent, as users may not 'read' the site in a linear way, like they might a print brochure.

Generally people don't read text based web content the same way they do print, they tend to be more impatient! A common approach is to have a 'overview' and 'details' structure to a site, giving people a choice in how deep they want to delve. You can use a 'Main' and 'Sub' Navigation structure to achieve this. Remember also to consider the use of other presentation media - Illustration, Images, Animation, Audio, or even Video.

As mentioned above (Site Content & Structure), an important part of writing for the web is breaking down texts into smaller, more easily digestible parts.

It is no accident that the software you use to view websites is called a 'Browser'. Many use the web in a similar way to reading a magazine, as opposed to reading a complex in-depth document. Your writing needs to reflect this, so in many cases a website should be seen as a means of introducing the ideas you are trying to communicate to people.

If you already have texts in print form and you want to transfer them to the web, consider rewriting them using a 'web style'. If there are long, dense, passages of text that need to be included on your website, give the user the option of also downloading a printable version of these documents (PDF, DOC, RTF).

Writing For Search Engines

There is another important consideration when writing for the web, one that relates most importantly to your site's 'homepage'. The 'homepage' is the entry point for your website, the page that automatically appears when people first arrive at your website. This page is important because it can be used to help people that are trying, through the use of 'Search Engines', to find your website.

Search Engines use the content of your 'homepage' to determine what your website is about. It then uses this information and matches it to ' search phrases'. So in writing your homepage you need to consider what search phrases might be used by someone trying to find a website similar to yours. You then need to make sure these same phrases are included in the text of your website's homepage. This is covered in greater detail in: Promoting A Website.

This idea of matching 'search phrases' or 'key phrases' can be applied to all the pages on your website, but your homepage is definitely the place to begin.

For more on Search Engines See: Promoting A Website

Design/Technological Considerations

The overall look of your website is extremely important. Even before reading a single line of text, visitors will form a opinion about your organisation based on how they interpret the visual aspects of your website's design - colours, shapes, density, hardness, softness, animated, static, type-faces, relative sizing, etc, etc.

Notice the order of this 'Planning' page; and where the idea of 'Design' is first mentioned? Many people make the mistake of thinking about visual design as the first step of the 'website development' process. Don't! You can't think about design until you know what it is you're designing. Content considerations and site structure always come first.

The basic building block for creating most web pages is HTML (Hyper Text Mark-Up Language). This allows for a basic rendering of static text and images. Everything else you see on the web is using technologies that have been 'bolted on' to this foundation.

You should not make any assumptions about the cost of designing and developing a website. Make sure you consult with your designer/developer as to what can be achieved and at what price. Some things that are easy and cheap to do in other media, may not be for the web.

See: Web Technologies

Site Maintenance & Updates

When formulating the structure and design for your website, you need to consider who and how it is going to be maintained. Depending on the nature of the website, changes and updates may need to be made on a daily basis. Will these updates, etc, be made in-house? What level of expertise is required to do this?

A website should have a structure that reflects the level of expertise of those who'll be responsible for maintaining it.

When you pass your plans on to a web development specialist, make sure they are aware of your proposed site maintenance strategy, so that this can be taken into consideration as part of the development.

Consider also 'future proofing' your website. This means your site having a built-in ability to expand. You don't want to have to rebuild the site again from the ground up, every time you have a new idea you want to add to it.

If you have neither the time or confidence to do a great deal of planning yourself, your web designer can do the whole thing for you. This will obviously make your website more costly to develop. Ultimately, the more help you give your web designer the easier it will be for them to develop the website you want.

Source: Click Here

24 Low-Cost Ways To Promote Your Business

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

So what can you do to market your business at low cost? Here are 24 proven methods to help get your business off the ground without spending a fortune.

1) If you don't have a business card and business stationery, have them made up -- immediately. Your business card, letterhead and envelope tell prospective customers you are a professional who takes your business seriously.

2) Get your business card into as many hands as possible. Call your friends and relatives and tell them you have started a business. Visit them and leave a small stack of business cards to hand out to their friends.

3) Talk to all the vendors from whom you buy products or services.Give them your business card, and ask if they can use your products or service, or if they know anyone who can. If they have newsgroups where business cards are displayed (printers often do, and so do some supermarkets, hairdressers, etc.), ask if yours can be added to the board.

4) Attend meetings of professional groups, computer user groups and groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, or civic associations. Have business cards in a pocket where they are easily reachable. Every time you start to say "My name is," reach in your pocket for a business card. By the time you get to "I run a..." (type of business), your business card should be deposited in the hand of the person with whom you are speaking. Don't forget to ask what the people you speak with do, and to really listen to them. They'll be flattered by your interest, and better remember you because of it.

5) Become actively involved in 3 or 4 of these groups. That will give you more opportunity to meet possible prospects. But remember: opportunists are quickly spotted for what they are, and get little business. While you won't want to become involved in activities that require a lot of your time in very many organizations, you can -- and should -- make real contributions to all of them by offering useful ideas and help with small parts of one-time projects;

6) Look for something unusual about what you do, and publicize it.Send out press releases to local newspapers, radio stations, cable TV stations, or magazines whose audiences are likely to be interested in buying what you sell. To increase your chance of having the material published, send along a photo (but not to radio stations) with your press release. Editors of printed publications are often in need of "art" (drawings or photos) to fill space and break up the gray look of a page of text.

7) Write an article that demonstrates your expertise in your field. Send it to non-competing newspapers, magazines, and Web sites such as the Business Know-How Web site. Be sure that your name, business name, reference to your product or service and phone number are included at the end of the article. If the editor can use the article, you get your name in print, and possibly get your contact information printed for free, too.

8) Whenever you do get publicity, get permission from the publisher to reprint the article containing the publicity. Make photocopies and mail the copies out with sales letters or any other literature you use to market your product or service. The publicity clips lend credibility to the claims you make for your products or services.

9) Contact nonprofit organizations, schools and colleges, and even other businesses who have customers who may need your services. Ask for work or leads.

10) Network with others who are doing the same type of work you are.Let them know you are available to handle their work overloads. (But don't try to steal their customers. Word will get out, and will ruin your business reputation.)

11) Offer to be a speaker on subjects utilizing your area of expertise.Volunteer organizations, libraries and online forums often need speakers for meetings. After you've had some practice speaking (enough to feel comfortable doing it and to have gotten some positive feedback), look into working with speaker's bureaus to book speaking engagements for you. You'll benefit two ways from such engagements: the fee you receive for doing them, and the publicity you, your product or service gets as a result.

12) If your product or service is appropriate, give demonstrations of itto whatever groups or individuals might be interested. Or, teach others how to use some tool you use in your work.

13) Find out what federal, state, and local government programs are in existence to help you get started in business. Most offer free counseling, and some may be able to suggest possible prospects for your business.

14) Send out sales letters to everyone you think might be able to use what you sell. Be sure to describe your business in terms of how it can help the prospect. Learn to drop a business card in every letter you send out.

15) If you use a car or truck in your business have your business name and contact information professionally painted on the side of the vehicle. That way your means of transportation becomes a vehicle for advertising your business. If you don't want the business name painted on the vehicle, consider using magnetic signs.

16) Get on the telephone and make "cold calls." These are calls to people who you would like to do business with. Briefly describe what you do and ask for an appointment to talk to them about ways you can help them meet a need or solve a problem.

17) Get samples of your product or your work into as many hands as possible.

18) Offer a free, no obligation consultation to people you think could use your services. During such consultations offer some practical suggestions or ideas -- and before you leave ask for an "order" to implement the ideas.

19) Learn to ask existing customers, prospects and casual acquaintances for referrals. When you get them, follow up on the leads.

20) Use other people to sell your product or service. Instead of (or in addition to) selling your products yourself, look for existing mail order companies that would be willing to include your products in their catalogs, or for distributors or sales agents who would be willing to take over sales chores for you. Be sure your pricing structure allows for the fees or commissions you will have to pay on any sales that are made.

21) Have sales letters, flyers and other pertinent information printed and ready to go. Ask prospects who seem reluctant to buy from you: "Would you like me to send information?" Follow up promptly with a note and a letter that says "Here is the information you asked me to send."

22) Run a contest. Make the prize something desirable and related to your business. It could be a free gift basket of your products, for instance, or free services.

23) Take advantage of any opportunities you have to get free ads, or to have your company and its product or service listed free of charge in a directory. or . Professional associations often publish such directories.

24) If your target market would be likely to use the Internet or online forums, participate in discussion groups and consider putting up a web page. But, if you do make it online, be sure to include your email address and your web page address (if you have one) on your business cards, in your promotional materials, in print ads and even on your letterhead.

Source: Click Here

Should I trademark my logo?

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

Q. Should I trademark my store's name and logo? How do I go about registering a trademark?

A. Simply using your name and logo as symbols of your store's distinctive products and services gives you trademark rights in the geographic area in which you operate, as long as you are the first person in your area to use them.
You may place the "TM" symbol on the logo to alert others to your claims on its use. You also have the right to sue others who imitate your name or logo.

If you want to protect your rights to the trademark in a broader area, you must register it. Registration gives notice to other businesses of your trademark and proves your use of the trademark, or your intent to use it, as of the date you apply.
If your mark is used only within Michigan, it should be registered at the state level. If you use or intend to use it in other states or countries, you should register it at the federal level. Only federally registered trademarks may use the ® symbol.

An application to register a trademark typically requires information about the trademark owner, a drawing of the trademark, identification of the goods or services on which the trademark is used and evidence of use (such as a photo of your storefront with the logo displayed).
The filing fee is $50 for the state and $325 for the federal application. The registration process typically takes about one year. Trademarks are in effect for 10 years and can be renewed indefinitely.

Attorney Bill Kolakowski, of law firm Dykema Gossett in Bloomfield Hills, recommends conducting a search to make sure that similar trademarks are not already in use before attempting to register your own. Applying to register your trademark could alert other businesses with similar names or logos and result in a lawsuit over possible trademark infringement.

A full search of both registered and unregistered trademarks by a professional search firm and an attorney's opinion on eligibility for registration and potential for infringement may cost about $1,000. You can also search nationally registered trademarks on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website listed below and at the Great Lakes Patent and Trademark Center at the Detroit Public Library.
For more information about trademarks, see the Michigan Department of Consumer and Industry Services website atwww.cis.state.mi.us/bcs/corp/tmsmform.htm and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website at www.uspto.gov.

Source: Click Here

Keyword Density Analyzer Tool

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

Thinking Beyond Keyword Density (ie: it's not 1997 anymore)

Please note that keyword density is a fairly meaningless measure of relevancy. However, using a keyword density analysis tool on a competitor's website can help you discover some good keyword phrases to use that you may not have noticed at a cursory glance.

Dr. E. Garcia explained why keyword density was a bad measure of relevancy in The Keyword Density of Non Sense.

Search engines may place significant weight on domain age, site authority, link anchor text and usage data.
The page title is typically weighted more than most any other text on the page.
The meta keywords tags, comments tags, and other somewhat hidden inputs may be given less weight than page copy.
Page copy which is bolded, linked, or in a heading tag is likely given greater weighting than normal text.
Weights are relative. If your whole page is in an H1 tag that looks shady, and it does not place more weight on any of the text since all the page copy is in it.
You probably want to avoid doing things like bolding H1 text as it is doubtful it will make a page seem any more relevant.
Lots are queries are a bit random in nature. When people tweak up page copy for an arbitrarily higher keyword density they typically end up removing some of the modifier terms that were helping the page appear relevant for many 3 and 4 word search queries.
Semantic related algorithms, may look at supporting vocabulary when determining the relevancy of a page. If you pulled the keyword phrase you were targeting out of your page copy would it still be easy for a search engine to mathematically model what that phrase was and what your page is about given the supporting text?
When people focus too much on keyword density they tend to write content which people would not be interested in reading or linking at.

Source: Click Here

Tips on Improving Your Google Search Engine Ranking

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

How to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking on Google

by Christopher Heng, thesitewizard.com

It's been some time since the last article on Google appeared in thesitewizard.com's newsletter, giving tips on how you can improve your search engine rank on Google. This article updates the Google search engine promotion tips given in that issue and extends it with new Google search engine positioning tips.

Background: Google's Page Ranking Algorithm

As many of you are probably already aware, Google ranks a page according to the number and quality of links leading to that page. For example, if your page has 100 quality links leading to it, it will rank higher than another page that has only 20 links pointing at it. Quality links come from pages that are themselves "important" (Google's own terminology).

Note that this is not a secret. Google actually publishes information about their ranking algorithm on their website. You can read it for yourself at http://www.google.com/technology/.

Improving Your Page Rank on Google

There are numerous tips floating around in webmaster circles about how to improve your ranking in search engine results on Google.

Get Those Inbound Links
Since Google ranks your pages according to the number of links pointing at your page, it stands to reason that you should try to get as many links pointing at your pages as possible. This is so obvious that I'm only mentioning it for completeness sake.
Your Title Tag
Google seems to give weight to the title of your page. By title, I mean the text that is sandwiched between the HTML
Content-Laden Pages (Keyword Density)
It has often been observed that Google considers keyword density a large factor in ranking pages in search engine results, more so than many other search engines. You can read more about keyword density and how you can improve it on your pages from my other article, Improving Your Keyword Density for Search Engine Positioning, at http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/keyworddensity.shtml
Keyword-laden Links?
According to a paper published by one of Google's founders, if the links pointing to your page has the relevant keyword text in them, it will cause your page to be ranked higher in search engine results. For example, a link with the text "Cheap Shoe Store" pointing at your site will cause your site to be listed earlier if a visitor searches for "cheap shoe store" than if the link simply said "click here". You can find a copy of the paper online at The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

Other Google Tips

Will Disabling Caching of Your Page Affect Your Page Rank?
Some time ago, it was claimed that Google would penalise pages that forbade it from caching their pages. As you know, Google caches the pages it indexes unless otherwise instructed. To avoid problems with people who feel that this is a copyright infringement (and other reasons), they allow sites to instruct the Google spider not to cache those pages using various means. One such method is outlined in my article on using META tags to manage the search engine spiders and listings, at http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/metatags.shtml
Google has apparently publicly denied that disabling caching would affect the page's ranking in any way. I tend to believe their claim.
Dynamic Pages and Google
Unlike some other search engines, Google is able to index dynamically generated pages, so long as a link exist to those pages somewhere. For example, a page like "http://example.com/showstuff.php?page=19" can be indexed by Google.
So if you have a dynamically generated page that you think should be indexed, make sure you put a link to it somewhere on your site.
ALT tags on Images
If you have been placing images on your website without bothering to place ALT tags, now is a good time to add ALT tags. Google apparently indexes the text given in the ALT tags of images.
META Keywords Tag is Ignored
Google ignores the META keywords tag, so, the optimization of this tag is not going to help you any with Google.

The Google Toolbar

The Google Toolbar can be obtained free of charge for Firefox and Internet Explorer. It gives you an idea of how important Google thinks your site is (in general) by showing the Page Rank of any page that you visit.

Unfortunately, to obtain the page rank of the pages you visit, the toolbar actually transmits information about the pages you visit to Google. Thus if you are worried about people tracking your Internet activity, you might want to restrict its use to times when you check your site's ranking. You can easily enable or disable the Page Rank feature from its Options menu.

Source: Click Here

Where to Submit Internet or Marketing Articles Free

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

Where to Submit Internet or Marketing Articles Free

Jan
27

Articles as links The fundamental base of the internet is not the page, but the link. A great way to accumulate links is to write articles and submit them to places interested in quality articles. Where do I submit articles in my field? Some places will accept articles automatically and some require editorial approval. If you know your industry well you should know some places that accept articles. I know within the search engine field I can submit articles to sites likeLil Engine, ISEDB, SearchGuild, and a variety of others.

Where do I submit general articles? There are also sites which take general articles such asIdea Marketers, Buzzle, Ebooks n Bytes, Article Central. The list goes on and on.

How do articles give me links? When you write articles for free you are typically given a by-line or author bio which you can link to your website.

How long should my articles be? Typically it is a good idea to review the editorial guidelines of websites before submitting articles. Most sites like articles around 600 to 900 words since the internet is a quick medium. Some sites like articles up to 1500 to 2000 words so they can split up the content to show more ads. Reading a few articles from the site should give you an idea what they are looking for.

Article resource location tips: A good tip to finding more might be to search for the name of a search engine copywriter. Karon Thackton is found on over 1,000 documents!

In addition to searching out people in your field you may want to use some of the Yahoo Announcement Groups and other article resources. Feel free to submit article resource locations in the comments :)

Submiting articles to Ezines is not something I generally do. I find that if you write an ok article and submit it to a few of these places people will just pick you up. You want to be careful about seeming spamy when trying to submit articles to ezines. A few good Ezine lists would beEzine Universe, Topica, the Ezine Directory

Additional article resources from Jeremy Gossman are listed below.

http://goarticles.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/add_url.html
http://amazines.com
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://bpubs.com/
http://businessknowhow.com/
http://www.certificate.net/wwio/ideas.shtml
http://www.promotionworld.com/
http://promotenewz.com/

Yahoo Announcement Groups

Eventually if you do a good enough job with your articles people who syndicate your artilces will have those same articles syndicated from there! Here is another small list of Ezine directories.

here are a few more sites you can submit articles to:
www.purplepages.ie
www.stickysauce.com
www.certificate.net
www.freesticky.com
www.bullmarketer.com

Here is another free XLS articles checksheet which shows over 70 sites where you can submit articles. Thanks Zoran

[update: here is more article submission locations]

The search for "Google Sells Christmas" will show you that about 40 web pages reference my second article. Before I wrote those articles my site was not popular, now it kinda is.

You can also look at content provider networks in DMOZ or the Yahoo! Directory.

Also a while ago somebody spammed me trying to promote "marketing blaster" and "search engine geek." If people publish articles that were sent to them via spam then odds are they will likely want to publish your articles too, so you may want to search for a few variations of those names such as "marketing blaster" or "marketingblaster."

Subscribe to our blog via email or RSS to get more great posts like this one!

Posted in: internet

by Aaron Wall

Your Thoughts? [9]

January 27, 2004

Source : SEOBOOK.COM

VistaPrint Design Challenge - Win Some Cash

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

How does this work anyway?

Many winners will be chosen – the more great designs we get, the more money we’ll dish out.

Official Rules and Submission of Content Terms and Conditions

Pick a Product to Get Started

Read the brief, design guidelines and everything you need to succeed in our downloadable kit.

What is Google Chrome?

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:13 PDT

1. Facebook

Facebook offers exceptional, low cost marketing opportunities for small business. Facebook now has over 300 million users, and while that seems like an outrageous number for small businesses to be targeting, Facebook offers a very powerful platform on which to build a presence. If you’re not already active on Facebook; you should get started right away.

Basic Strategy: If you haven’t signed up for Facebook yet, you absolutely should as soon as possible. Once you’ve signed up, you should also consider securing your company’s username. Be aware, however, that if you reserve your company name for your personal account, you won’t be able to use it for your Business Fan Page (more on those in the Advanced Strategy), so you may want to create a Page before registering your company’s name. Fan Pages have special rules regarding usernames, which you can read here.

You should do one other thing: search for your competitors and evaluate their Facebook presence. What types of Pages have they built? How many fans or “friends” do they have? Spend 15 minutes (per competitor) looking at their posts, photos and/or videos to understand how they’re using Facebook.

Advanced Strategy: You may already have a personal Facebook account, but how do you extend that presence for your business? You have several options. You can register a Business Account – which is designed for a very simple presence on Facebook. There are many limitations on such accounts (read theFAQ here), however, so you’ll most likely prefer to have a Business Fan Page. A Business Fan Page lets you create a page where customers or fans of your business can register as a “fan” — expanding the presence of your business (because your updates will also flow to their pages). You might also want to consider running hyper-local ads on Facebook.

2. Twitter

Twitter has grown tremendously over the past year. For some small businesses, it offers an incredible marketing platform. BusinessWeek’s recent profile of 20 ways businesses use Twitter might give you some ideas about how you can leverage Twitter for your business.

Basic Strategy: If you haven’t signed up on Twitter yet, you should sign up today and reserve an account in the name of your business. While you might ultimately tweet in your own name, you’ll want to have the option to tweet from a business account. More importantly, you don’t want your competitors to register your business name. Twitter has put together a simple guide to help you understand what Twitter can do for business. You can also check out Mashable’s Twitter Guide.

Next, you should spend 15-30 minutes on Twitter’s homepage, doing basic searches to become familiar with the type of content available on the service. For example, if you are operating a small gift basket business, do some searches for various terms and phrases such as “gift basket,” “gifts,” “gift basket business,” etc. You should also search for the names of your competitors to see whether they’re on Twitter and if they are, how they’re using it. And don’t forget to search for your small business name – your customers may already be talking about you! Once you become comfortable with the content that’s already available and how your competitors are using Twitter, you can begin thinking about a strategy for how you’ll leverage Twitter for your business.

Advanced Strategy: To truly leverage Twitter, you’ll want to learn and use a few more advanced tools. This includes desktop and mobile Twitter clients like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and Tweetie. Desktop clients give you more flexibility and more control over your Twitter strategy than you’ll have on the Twitter website. Among other things, you’ll be able to pre-define searches (so that you can monitor certain keywords, including your business name) and group people you follow so that you can minimize the noise and focus on the real content. You might also consider using a web tool like Twitterfall, which will allow you to define (and color-code) various custom searches that you can review from time to time, and also to follow trending topics. For example, I use Twitterfall to identify helpful graphic design and industrial design resources to share with the crowdSPRING community.

3. Company Blog

Although there’s more attention focused today on social networks than on company blogs, blogs continue to offer great value for small businesses.

Basic Strategy: At a minimum, you should consider reserving a domain name for your blog – if you don’t already have a custom domain for your business. If you’re comfortable enough to set up your own blog, that’s generally the best way to proceed – although this requires a bit more technical knowledge (many hosting providers offer a 1 step easy setup for blogs that will automatically install WordPress for you). You can also setup a blog directly at WordPress.com (it’s easier to do, but you don’t have full control over everything that you would on your own site).

One easy alternative is to set up a simple blog at Posterous – a place to post stories, photos, videos, MP3s, and files. There are pluses and minuses to all of these options – you should take some time to compare them and do what makes sense for your business. I caution you only about spreading yourself too thin.

Advanced Strategy: Now that you’ve decided to start or improve your small business blog, how do you build an audience for it? It all starts with great content. Decide on a focus for your blog, and write awesome content that people will enjoy. For example, some months ago at my company, we decided that we wanted to write more about small business issues, so we’ve been writing original posts focusing on issues affecting small businesses. Think about your expertise and more importantly, think about the things that you’re interested in writing about. A blog requires a long term investment of time (and resources), and you don’t want to be stuck writing about things that bore you.

You’ll also want to consider how you can make it easier for your readers to help promote your content. For example, install helpful plug-ins, such as a TweetMeme button, which makes it easy for people to retweet your posts on Twitter. Don’t be afraid to experiment with plugins to add to the functionality of your blog, but keep it simple. You want to keep the blog focused, and easy for your readers to use.

4. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business oriented social network for professionals, and it’s huge, with nearly 50 million users from over 200 countries.

Basic Strategy: Once again, you’ll want to at least reserve your business name (or your personal name) so that others can’t use it. Similar to the way you might start exploring Facebook and Twitter, you should look around on LinkedIn to see how your competitors are using the service. You might also look up your customers and connect with them.

Advanced Strategy: LinkedIn has some powerful features that most people don’t use. For example, you can encourage your customers, clients or vendors to give you a “recommendation” on your profile. Recommendations are useful because they’ll make you and your business more credible with new customers. If you’re a roofer, for example, ask your customers to recommend you after a successful job. You’ll find such recommendations useful – particularly since your LinkedIn profile will come up high in search engine results. I recommend that you read Chris Brogan’s post from last year discussing the elements of a good LinkedIn recommendation.

Another strategy involves the many subject matter groups on LinkedIn. Find some groups that have a connection to your small business and become involved in the conversations. Answer questions when you can, and help to establish yourself as knowledgeable about specific topics related to your business. There are many small business and general marketing groups that will be very useful resources for you, and if there isn’t a group that interests you, consider starting one.

5. Participate On Other Blogs

It might seem counter-intuitive for you to spend your valuable time by participating in discussions on other people’s blogs, but the payoff can be very valuable. Remember that it takes time to build a reputation and establish your credibility, and you can’t always expect everyone to come to you. Sometimes, you have to go out and build your own credibility and reputation.

Basic Strategy: Identify 2-3 blogs in your industry, or those that focus on small business, and get into the habit of regularly reading the content and participating in the discussions. Whenever you can, try to add value by sharing a personal story about what has/has not worked for you. Get to know the writers – they’ll be valuable contacts for you. One strategy for identifying good blogs is to use Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop, which is a directory of popular blogs across many different subject areas. For example, for blogs focused on crafts, you might follow this page on Alltop. If you want to participate in blogs focusing on small business issues, you might start at Technorati’s list of the Top 100 Small Business blogs.

Advanced Strategy: Once you’ve spent some time on other blogs and have participated in discussions, you’ll find that you’ve built a level of credibility and trust, based on your participation. You should consider reaching out to the blog owners and asking whether they’d allow you to guest post an article on their blog (kind of like this post). This is a nice way for you to get in front of a bigger audience, and many blog owners will invite guests to post from time to time. Agree on a topic in advance and provide a draft of your post sufficiently in advance of the publication date to give them an opportunity to review.

Alternatively, ask if they would consider guest posting on your blog. Since you’re looking to attract more readers (and more potential customers), either option works well for that purpose. Don’t worry so much about going after the A-list blogs right away. There are many excellent blogs and it might take a bit of time to build your reputation to such a level that you’ll have opportunities to post in the top blogs. That doesn’t mean you should wait, though – make opportunities for yourself and offer to guest write whenever you can find a new audience. I recommend you read How To Guest Post To Promote Your Blog from blogging expert Darren Rowse.

6. Mobile Social Networks and other Local Strategies

Yelp publishes millions of reviews about local businesses. Foursquare is a combination city-guide, friend finder and competitive game. It allows users to “check in” by cell phone at a local venue and announce this via other social networks such as Twitter.

Basic Strategy: Yelp, Foursquare, and other mobile social networks can be powerful marketing channels for small businesses. You should at the very least register accounts on the popular services and get to know them. If you have a restaurant or a retail store, for example, you’ll want to get to know Yelp pretty well. You can set up a business account on Yelp (no cost), which will let you answer questions about your business, track how many Yelp users view your business page, add information about your business, and announce special promotions. Similarly, you’ll want to sign up with Foursquare to take advantage of local advertising opportunities. Using Foursquare, you’ll be able to push promotions to potential customers who’re in the vicinity of your business.

You should also consider other local strategies. For example, you can add your business to Google Maps, or update your listing to include additional details. You can do the same on Bing.

Advanced Strategy: If you believe that your business can truly benefit from a presence on Yelp, Foursquare, or similar networks, you’ll want to do more than just register accounts with those services. For example, Yelp allows you to include a website URL for your business. Nearly all sites will let you upload photos to your profile, and photos will make your profile more trustworthy.

You can also proactively use Yelp and other similar services to promote your business. Ask your customers, friends and family who have used your services for a review on Yelp. You can encourage reviews by running promotions or discounts – offering free appetizers, for example, to a customer who will write a review about their meal at your restaurant (or to one who already wrote a review), or a small discount to a customer who hires you for carpentry work and mentions that they found you through Yelp.

Similarly, you can find ways to promote your business using Foursquare and similar networks. If you have a TV display in your store connected to a computer, you can display the people who are checking in. You can offer specials or discounts to the person who visits your location the most (this is similar to frequent buyer cards that many businesses have used for years).

Don’t forget to also consider how you can improve your use of other basic local strategies. For example, many small business websites are optimized for specific keywords or subject areas, but are rarely optimized for local searches. If you have a gift basket business, you’ll want to be sure that users searching for gift baskets in your geographic area will find you.

7. Comments and Conversations About Your Company

Whether or not you are a party to the conversations, people will talk about your company. How do you monitor and, when appropriate, join those discussions?

Basic Strategy: There are five simple steps you can take today to begin paying attention to conversations about your business.

First, set up Google Alerts. Google Alerts are free email updates from Google search results about any topic you’re interested in tracking. For example, I track, among other alerts, the names of our competitors, the name of our company, and certain other terms I believe are important to my business. Anytime Google adds something to its index that mentions my company or the other terms I’m tracking, I receive an immediate email notification with a link to that item. Alerts can be set up for web, blog, news, video, or groups searches.
Second, review the results in your web analytics data. At my company, we use Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that provides detailed and very useful information about your website traffic and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. When we run social media campaigns, we’ll often attach tracking tags to those campaigns so that we can properly monitor them in Google Analytics. This is important because without such data it will be nearly impossible for you to evaluate the success of your social media marketing efforts. But analytics are important for another reason: they’ll tell you which sites are sending traffic to your site.
Third, search Facebook. In August, Facebook rolled out a real-time search engine (the search box is on the top right of any Facebook page). One effective way to take advantage of Facebook search is to search for your company’s name to see who is talking about your company and what they’re saying. In several months, you’ll be able to search Facebook updates directly from Bing, which will be integrating Facebook public updates into Bing’s search results.
Fourth, search Twitter. You currently can search Twitter for real-time results (if you’re not logged in, just go to Twitter’s homepage). One easy way to monitor conversations about your company is to search for your company’s name. You can also currently do this on Bing, which is indexing Twitter updates. Very soon, you’ll also be able to search Twitter updates (and other social media content) via Google’s Social Search (Social Search was rolled out to Google Labs recently, as an experimental product). You can also use Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic to save searches and monitor in real-time whenever someone uses a specific word or phrase in a tweet.
Finally, take advantage of services that will, similar to Google Alerts, push data to you. I use and likeBackType, which is a real-time search engine that indexes online conversations in thousands of blogs and social networks. I use BackType primarily to keep up with conversations in blogs. Every day, I receive emails from BackType with links to comments that include the keywords I’m monitoring. Without these alerts, I would be unable to monitor so many blogs, and my ability to respond to posts about my company would be very limited.

Advanced Strategy: If you’re having trouble keeping track of your various search strategies, you should consolidate your efforts and leverage one of the many applications that will help you monitor the social web. I have not personally used these services, but they appear to be held in high esteem by knowledgeable people who have. For example, truVOICE provides keyword monitoring of the social web with an emphasis on blogs and forums, while Radian6 pulls in a lot of information from the social web, analyzes it, and provides consumer sentiment ratings for your brand. A good resource to learn about paid social media monitoring tools is Mashable’s post Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For.

In addition to monitoring, you’ll need to decide how, when, and where you’ll engage in conversations. It’ll be very difficult for you to engage in conversations everywhere, so you should spend some time learning the various networks and deciding where you should focus your efforts. Looking at your website analytics data — if you own an online business — will help a great deal because it’ll help you to better understand where your traffic is coming from. If much of your traffic originates from Twitter and Facebook, for example, you’ll want to spend more time on those services.

8. Multimedia

Multimedia (video, photos, audio) is a bit more complicated for many small businesses to execute, but can provide excellent social media marketing opportunities.

Basic Strategy: YouTube has been constantly evolving and adding features that make it an attractive social site for small businesses. Although you don’t have to produce videos to participate on YouTube, you should consider whether simple videos can help your marketing efforts. For example, if you’re already posting videos to your blog, you can upload them to YouTube to reach a broader audience, and embed the video content in your blog posts. YouTube has also been adding more comprehensive activity updates for its users and has made pretty powerful analytics tools available so that you can evaluate the effectiveness of your video content.

Similarly, you could start a Flickr account for your business and post photos of your customers or your products (or both). Flickr offers a place where people can share photos with others, but also has discussion groups, many focused on local markets, that offer additional opportunities for you to market your business. You can also consider setting up your own Internet radio talk show using BlogTalkRadio, which is another way to use multimedia to speak directly to your customers. Get creative with it — own a restaurant? Start a call-in show for people to ask cooking questions. Are you a piano teacher? Perhaps you could start a show to talk about classical music.

Advanced Strategy: Advanced strategies using multimedia are complicated and typically benefit from using experienced consultants. One effective way to leverage video, for example, is to create content that has the potential to become viral. While I don’t believe you can set out to make a viral video (an incredible amount of luck is typically involved), there are a number of things you can typically do to build awareness about your small business using viral video (these strategies are beyond the scope of this post). Once you’ve created good content, you’ll want to distribute it using as many social networks as you can.

When you consider how you can leverage social networks, think about whether each network provides an audience or a technology solution (or both). For example, YouTube provides both a huge audience and a solution for uploading video files. Flickr can also provide both an audience and a technology solution, but not for every business. While your customers might not be on Flickr, you can still use Flickr as a place to store and tag your photos, and then distribute those photos to other social networks where you prefer to invest more time and effort.

9. Maintain Brand Consistency

We’ve discussed only a small handful of social networks. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of others, and new ones spring up every day. That means that your customers will have many different ways to find you. But they won’t find you if your brand is scattered across social networks using different usernames and profiles. Let’s review some strategies for making sure that your brand is consistent across social networks.

Basic Strategy: Usernames and user profiles are already showing up in search results. Do a search for your company’s name on Google right now — if you also have a Twitter account with the same name, odds are pretty good that the Twitter account will appear very high in the search results. This means that having a consistent username across the various social networks is very important. At a minimum, if you haven’t registered your company name on the major networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), you should do that today. For many small businesses, their user accounts on social networks will be the highest ranked pages in search results.

You should also evaluate your email and web presence strategies. For example, are you using a Gmailemail address when you can very easily be using a custom email address with your company name as your domain? Compare: restaurantname@gmail.com with john@restaurantname.com — which looks more professional? Similarly, are you hosting your blog at WordPress.com instead of on your own custom domain? Little details can make a difference.

Advanced Strategy: Things get a bit more complicated when you consider that there are many different social networks, and it’s tough to predict which of them will become popular and which will fail. Use a service such as namechk or KnowEm to see whether your username is available on dozens of popular social networks and if it’s not, to see which username could be registered across all social networks.

Maintaining name consistency is important, but isn’t enough by itself. You’ll also want to make sure that your brand speaks with a common “voice” across the social networks. This may be easier said than done. Social networks differ in significant ways from one another and present unique challenges for interacting with customers and potential customers on those networks.

Speaking with a common “voice” doesn’t mean that only one person should execute your company’s social media marketing strategy, but it does mean that everyone who speaks on behalf of your company in social media reflects your brand in a consistent way. I recommend you read Shel Israel’s recently published book “Twitterville,” for excellent tips and stories focusing on how large and small businesses can develop a consistent voice in social media.

10. Leverage Combinations of Social Media Tools

One of the best ways for small businesses to leverage social media marketing is to use various social networks in combination with each other.

Basic Strategy: At a minimum, you should do several things today to cross-market across the various social networks you’re most likely already using. Here are three suggestions:

First, connect your Twitter account to Facebook so that your tweets will appear in your public updates on Facebook. This will let you leverage your time on Twitter to also update your Facebook fans.
Second, connect your LinkedIn profile to your WordPress blog. LinkedIn allows you to publish, in your profile, synopses of the most recent blog posts on your blog. This application will automatically update your LinkedIn profile with your most recent blog posts.
Third, integrate Twitter tools into your blog. I like and use the TweetMeme retweet button on my blogs to make it easier for users to tweet about the blog posts. I also use the ShareThis tool to enable readers to quickly share content on multiple social networks.

Advanced Strategy: Advanced strategies require careful planning/execution and appropriate tools. In nearly all cases, your goal is to maximize the value of your content. For example, if you’re posting videos on YouTube or Vimeo, you can blog about those videos on your company’s blog. Then, you can tweet about the blog posts on Twitter (which I assume is integrated with your Facebook account). This way, you’ve taken one piece of content and found a way to leverage it across multiple social networks.

You’ll also want to consider ways that you can optimize the distribution to multiple social networks at the same time. Leverage tools to help you do this. For example, Ping.fm lets you update multiple social networks all in one go. Keep in mind that not all social networks will make sense for every business. Learn which networks are best for your business and find ways to leverage combinations of those networks to make your marketing more effective.

Conclusion

Social media marketing can be a phenomenal marketing channel for small businesses. I hope that the strategies I’ve outlined above provide a starting point for you to explore how you can leverage social media marketing for your small business.

And if you have additional resources to share or other helpful advice that’s worked for your small business (or thoughts about things to avoid), please take a minute and leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you.

Source: Click Here

7 Small Business Marketing Tips

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

1. Don't Advertise Like a Big Business
Big businesses advertise to create name recognition and future sales. A small business can't afford to do that. Instead, design your advertising to produce sales ...now. One way to accomplish this is to always include an offer in your advertising - and an easy way for prospective customers to respond to it.

2. Offer a Cheaper Version
Some prospective customers are not willing to pay the asking price for your product or service. Others are more interested in paying a low price than in getting the best quality. You can avoid losing sales to many of these customers by offering a smaller or stripped down version of your product or service at a lower price.

3. Offer a Premium Version
Not all customers are looking for a cheap price. Many are willing to pay a higher price to get a premium product or service. You can boost your average size sale and your total revenue by offering a more comprehensive product or service ...or by combining several products or services in a special premium package offer for a higher price.

4. Try Some Unusual
Look for some unconventional marketing methods your competitors are overlooking. You may discover some highly profitable ways to generate sales and avoid competition. For example, print your best small ad on a postcard and mail it to prospects in your targeted market. A small ad on a postcard can drive a high volume of traffic to your website or generate a flood of sales leads for a very small cost.

5. Trim Your Ads
Reduce the size of your ads so you can run more ads for the same cost. You may even be surprised to find that some of your short ads generate a better response than their longer versions.

6. Set up Joint Promotions with Other Small Businesses
Contact some non-competing small businesses serving customers in your market. Offer to publicize their products or services to your customers in exchange for their publicizing your services to their customers. This usually produces a large number of sales for a very low cost.

7. Take Advantage of Your Customers
Your customers already know and trust you. It's easier to get more business from them than to get any business from somebody who never bought from you. Take advantage of this by creating some special deals just for your existing customers ...and announce new products and services to them before you announce them to the general market.

Also, convert your customers into publicity agents for your business. Develop an incentive for them to tell associates and friends about the value of your products or services. An endorsement from them is more effective than any amount of advertising - and it is much cheaper.

Each of these 7 marketing tips provides a simple, low-cost way for any small business to find customers and generate sales quickly.

Source: Click Here

A 1000 Faces Youtube Video

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

Special Events Sale @ MADMINDSTUDIOS.COM

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

Logo Design $99 - Website Design $199

The identity systems Mad Mind Studios creates expresses a strategic vision, through research, and a well-considered approach to color, typography, and symbol in a range of media and settings. My goal is to illuminate and influence, capturing the many experiences that surround a brand – in its current form and as it evolves throughout the marketplace. Creating an effective brand is something that requires experience. The graphic design company you work with needs to ask the right questions in order to get the right concept. By working with MMS, you will be tapping into knowledgeable experience in creating unique brand identities for my clients. MMS will connect your business to the world and exceed your business' potential.

SPECIAL EVENTS SALE

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Custom Twitter Design Starting $49

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

Now you can personalize your Twitter background like never before. Personalize your profile with a custom badge. Add your name, logo, website and more. Get your Personalized Background Today! Mad Mind Studios' Custom Backgrounds assist individuals and businesses in creating a customized appearance on Twitter to more effectively market to followers and customers. Show Your Followers Who You Really Are!

Website Redesign Makeover

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

So you've looked at your website and it just doesn't have that old zing, eh? Perhaps it was built many years ago, when technology wasn't anywhere near today's levels. Or maybe the site was designed by a friend/nephew/second cousin, twice removed, and you now feel compelled to get it professional redesigned. Regardless, coming to the conclusion that you need to do something is a good first step.

What we'll do with you is talk about your existing site, what you like about it, and what you don't like about it. We'll determine how much of the existing content we can use, and what we'll need to access it. Then we'll start talking about all of the new features that you're going to want in your site. We'll meet and view various websites and discuss a strategy. After the meeting, in a few days, we'll present a proposal to redesign the website.

Branding, Marketing, Custom Ad Design

designaholix@gmail.com (Omid Mousaei) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:25:03 PDT

BRANDING

Branding is the process of creating or influencing the customer's perception of what your business, product or service is all about. This involves the forming and shaping of expectations through evoking emotional responses.

There are several interconnected elements that help to form your "brand." Although the colors, fonts, shapes and imagery that you choose to communicate to your customer with are only part of the equation, it is a crucial aspect that Promotion Lotion can help you with.

We offer a wide range of services and products, from logo design to brochure and marketing collateral conception, which can start you on your path to brand development. Be sure to ask about special discounts for comprehensive packages that can be instrumental in forming a brand foundation for your business.

CREATIVE CONSULTATION

I know that just because you have the know-how to start or run your business, that doesn't necessarily mean you have the creative vision needed to develop a brand identity or the advertising and marketing concepts that you'll need to maximize sales.
That's where Mad Mind Studios can help. I have the creative power to help develop anything from a simple and effective domain name or a corporate brand identity to a full fledged postcard marketing campaign, complete with graphics and copy that will excite your prospective clients and stir up sales.
> Corporate Identity
>Brand Identity
>Creative Advertising Concepts
>Creative Marketing Concepts
>Creative Imagery
>Creative Copywriting
My approach varies from client to client. I adapt to your needs and budget so that we can help you achieve what you need with respect to the demographic you are targeting.
Send me an email or give me a call at 1.310.402.1613 so that I can discuss a plan that's right for your situation and budget.
CUSTOM AD DESIGN

Discover the results that powerful advertisement design can have for you.
Mad Mind Studios ad design services help take the worry and tedium out of maximizing your marketing potential. Mad Mind Studios incorporates the perfect mix of art and marketing science in order to assure that your business and your message stand out. It is important to have both an attractive and fundamentally sound advertisement when trying to increase sales by reaching out to new customers.
GET MORE ATTENTION
Whether it is a newspaper, magazine or web advertisement, our custom designed ads are sure to bring attention to your product or service, but bold and impressive designs are just part of the equation. Mad Mind Studios brainstorm with you about your business ad's desired results in order to develop the headlines that will maximize it's punch.
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Mad Mind Studios uses true marketing techniques in order to achieve maximum return on investment. Making sure to engage your audience with the beneficial aspects of your product or service is a philosophy that I try to incorporate when designing your ad.

MAD MIND STUDIOS

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10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips

1. Facebook

2. Twitter

3. Company Blog

4. LinkedIn

5. Participate On Other Blogs

6. Mobile Social Networks and other Local Strategies

7. Comments and Conversations About Your Company

8. Multimedia

9. Maintain Brand Consistency