Plain and simple – logo creation is not that easy (and really not that cheap).

Hiring a premium-level firm like UBD or an e-famous independent artist can run up a considerably large bill. Somewhere close to $1k will get you a handful of very well made drafts. Fortunately, when you work with professionals, you’re going to get your money’s worth. Not a bad way to go at all, but not all of us can afford that level of service.

We can hear you telling yourself right now, “That’s just too much money.” Hold onto that thought, as we’ll be answering that later on in this post. What do you do if $1k+ is well outside of your budget?

Time is always of the essence, and logos can chew away at your time like you wouldn’t believe. Trying to sift through an endless number of artists/designers/firms, comparing pricing, then going on to potentially rejecting drafts that come your way can take FOREVER. Trust us, we occasionally have to hire other people to do work for us, and tracking down legitimate help is PAINFULLY SLOW. Like pull-your-hair-out type slow. Luckily, we have the skills (obviously) to handle all creative work in-house, so we have a backup plan for logos. Not everyone is in our position, though, so we’ll help you get your backup logo plan later in this post.

So, here are a few strategies we recommend to develop logos:

Get Specific

Have an idea in mind before you even go looking for help with a logo. While it’s always great to let a designer run free with an open concept, you’re also leaving yourself open to a surprise when you get drafts back.

Keep It Simple

You probably won’t want to go overboard while thinking of a logo design.

Is It Printable?

Think about your logo being printed on a plain, white business card. MOST logos will want to adhere to a color scheme that looks appropriate on a white background. It just makes your life easier down the road when expanding your marketing and branding efforts.

This isn’t a rule, but simply a kind suggestion.

Show The Draft(s) To Others Before Deciding

Okay, so you’ve got yourself a draft but aren’t sure if it’s the perfect logo for your business… How do you make sure it’s good? Show it to other people!

Try to avoid only showing your drafts to people in your office. You’d be surprised how often honest opinions can be drowned out by group dynamics. Test your designs against “non-techie” folks before actually using them in live marketing.

Sounds good, but I’m not a designer and don’t have a lot of money to invest into my logo…

First off, it’s totally okay. We’ve all been there. Sometimes the most creative solutions to problems come forth when cash and resources are low.

By now, you have most likely heard about 99designs.com and how great they are for crowdsourcing design work (logos included). We’ve used their site before, and it’s pretty amazing to see how many talented designers answer your calling when needed.

There are two ways in which you can really use 99 Designs to help with your logo design:

1. Start a new project with them, and have tons of designers design something for you (starting at $211)
2. Or, you can try their new “Ready-made” logos for only $99

99 Designs is a pretty incredible resource when you think about it. For only a few hundred bucks, you can have a group of talented designers take a shot at making your perfect company logo.

If you’ve only got $99 to spare, they’ll let you choose from a HUGE number of awesome logos that will most likely work for you.

To summarize, here are a few options:

• EXPENSIVE – Pay a very talented design firm or independent artist to create your logo.
• PRETTY EXPENSIVE – Crowdsource your logo design on 99 Designs, or on a similar site.
• INEXPENSIVE – Get a “Ready-made” logo for only $99.

Hopefully you’ve got a basic idea of how to get started with your logo, and where you will be able to get one made for you. As an extra help to you, here’s a quick link for 99 Designs:

Standout Comments is a joint venture product between John Chow, Alex Shalman and Jeff Rose.

Their goal was to create a WordPress plugin that would not only engage your readership and keep them coming back to your blog but it will make you money as well.

We think they hit on all targets and Standout Comments will soon become a must have plugin for every WordPress blog!

Supercharge Your Comment Section

Your comment section is one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on your blog. However, most bloggers don’t take proper advantage of it. When using a third party apps like Crazy Egg to track where readers look, click and visit, I have consistently found that area around the comment field is the most busy. Anything I place there gets a better response than in other locations.

Standout Comments take advantage of the busy comment area to put your message across. The plugin offers enhanced comment features, subscription and sharing option and the ability to monetize the comment section.

As explained in the video above, Standout Comments is extremely easy to install – just upload to your WordPress plugins folder and activate it in your WordPress control panel. From there you’ll be able to set all the options the plugin offers. For example, below are the option tabs to add social media buttons and Aweber opt in codes. There are also options for Twitter, advertising and general.

You can turn on any or all options to give the comment section the look and feel you want. Here’s how it looks on John Chow’s blog when it is turned on.

Only $67 for Unlimited Blog License

Standout Comments sells for $67 for an unlimited license. You only need to buy one plugin to use it on any blog that you own. The plugin will help you get more subscribers to your email list, promote your blog posts on social media services like Twitter and even runs banners advertising so you can make money on a highly valued part of your blog real estate.

Put Standout Comments on Your Blog and Win an iPad

To kick out the launch of Standout Comments, the Standout Comments guys are holding an iPad-giveaway contest for the month of May. Purchase Standout Comments, install it on your blog and it may win you a brand new 16GB Apple iPad! They’re offering one entry per blog, so if you have five blog and install Standout Comments on all them, you’ll get five entries!

Also, anyone buying the plugin this month will get a free $47 eBook from John Chow on the secrets of getting blog comments! This is too good to pass up!

Make Your Comments Standout with Standout Comments

There is actually a very easy method of doing this and it is crucial to successfully using WordPress themes to market your business online.

To install multiple themes, you need multiple installations of WordPress. Our recommendation is to install WordPress and the theme of your choice on sub-directories.

For example, let’s say that you already have a blog, yourblog.com, and you want to have a squeeze page that you can send traffic to and you want the squeeze page URL to be connected to yourblog.com. All you need to do is install WordPress and Squeeze Theme on the sub-directory (yourblog.com/squeeze).

If you want a sales page, you could also install a sales page on another subdirectory as well, like yourblog.com/sales.

You can repeat this process as many times as your web host allows.

Here is a short video of how to do it using BlueHost:

This is definitely the easiest way to quickly setup WordPress and our themes on your blog. As we mentioned, our recommended hosting provider, BlueHost, offers this amazing functionality.

When you create a Facebook Fan Page, you are pitching your blog to a potential audience of 400 million active users.

Here are some facts you should consider:

• 20 million people become fan pages everyday.
• There are over 5.3 billion Facebook fans overall.
• The typical user becomes a fan of 4 pages per month.

With these numbers in mind, it’s easy to see why you should invest a little time and energy into creating a Fan Page.

Let’s take a closer look at why it’s a good idea:

1. It’s easy for users to “fan.”

All it takes is one click for people to fan your Page. It eliminates a lot of the steps people typically take to connect with the content of your blog.

A user does not need to:

• type in their first name,
• type in their last name,
• type in their e-mail address,
• click the “Subscribe!” button,
• wait for the confirmation e-mail in their inbox, or
• click on the e-mailed link to confirm their subscription.

All of these steps have been consolidated into one simple, almost-thoughtless click of the “Become a Fan” button.

It couldn’t be easier for someone to get involved with your content, and you’ll never have to worry about your messages winding up in someone’s spam folder.

2. The News Feed is gold.

In a way, Facebook’s News Feed has become a highly-personalized AP wire.

The average user spends 55 minutes per day on Facebook. Everything they read, including your posts, can seem equally important and respectable.

Being where they spend most of their time is a good segway to hooking in more readers.

3. Detailed demographics!

The Facebook Insights Page shows a wealth of information about your fans including:

The information allows bloggers to better understand who reads his/her content. The more you know about your audience, the better!

4. It’s easy to trick out Fan Pages.

You can make your Facebook Fan Page look amazingly professional.

The FBML (Facebook Markup Language) static page widget allows you to add custom tabs to your Page. It can incorporate PHP, HTML, CSS, and Facebook’s proprietary code to create custom tabs with e-mail signups, promotions and more info on your blog.

I won’t get too technical in this post, but stay tuned for Part II and Part III for more information about FBML!

5. Facebook is all about community.

Facebook users have a neighborly, social mindset while they are browsing their News Feed. When they skim through their friend’s updates, “Likes,” and photos, they are seeing if there is anything they can interact with.

When you post something new to your Page, users are still in this mindset. As a result, your content will look less intimidating and less commercialized.

This makes it more likely for them to look at what you have to say. If you seem friendly and try to start discussions, your followers will respond positively.

Users will also remember you better because they are more receptive.

6. Pages may lead to higher conversion rates.

The combination of ease of use, strong community and large number of users means that conversion rates are high.

A good example of these high conversion rates can be seen with the guys from UBD. They started actively promoting and advertising their Facebook Fan Page a few weeks ago and have already seen stunning results.

Their Google AdWords account showed only a 5% e-mail opt-in rate while their Facebook Fan Page has an average 20% e-mail opt-in rate.

That means that their advertisements on Facebook have proved to be 15% more cost effective than Google AdWords, so far.

A reason for this high turn-over rate may be because advertising through Google AdWords is very competitive, while Facebook advertising is still young.

It seems that for the moment, and with the right strategy, Facebook advertising is a better deal.

7. Do it now, before it gets more competitive.

It’s a good idea to be an early adopter with anything Facebook-related! Although there are over 400 million active users on Facebook, this number is still growing.

New Fan Pages are constantly being created, but the world is just beginning to realize how useful these Pages really are.

The sooner you start, the easier it will be for you to stand out in the long run.

Create your Fan Page, today!

More about how to customize your Fan Page’s layout and drive more traffic to your Page will be detailed in Part II and Part III of this blog series.

P.S. – Don’t forget to become a fan of Unique Blog Designs on Facebook.

Our last redesign was completed in May of 2008 and as nice as it was, it was definitely time for a fresh look. The new design adds the Seattle skyline to the header, signifying our recent move.

We have also added some additional information about the products we have released over the past year, including Affiliate Theme (launched in March of 2009), Squeeze Theme (November 2009) and Sales Page Theme (February 2010).

A new eBook – Squeeze Pages 101

If you have been following our new theme, Squeeze Theme, then you may be aware of the recent eBook we released – Squeeze Pages 101.

On the homepage, we added a video with an opt-in to download our new eBook.

Squeeze Pages 101 is all about to how marketers use squeeze pages as a tool to increase their customers and prospects. Don’t miss out – this eBook will only be available for a limited time!

You can download the eBook by signing up for the UBD newsletter on this page (at the top of the sidebar under ‘Stay Up To Date’.)

Some new clients in our portfolio

Over the past two years, we have been fortunate to work with a number of well-known companies and people including MySpace, Yahoo!, Nike, and even the personal lifestyle coach, Tony Robbins.

We have updated our portfolio with some of the new designs we have recently completed.

Check out the portfolio to see these new designs.

Social media integration

As Twitter and Facebook become more popular, it made sense to increase our interaction with each service. The obvious thing to do was to add links to Facebook page and Twitter at the top of each page.

Of course, offering exclusive content/information to each community is a great way to incentive joining/following, so please make sure you follow us on Twitter and Facebook for the latest news and exclusive content from UBD.

Most importantly, what do you think of the new design?

Losing data (your blog posts and design) is a nightmare that many bloggers have. Commonly, servers will crash in mid-step when making changes to your blog. This will undoubtedly cause you, or your webmaster, to have a throbbing headache. Knowing that server crashes and data corruption is a problem, you’ll want to do something about it.

We’ve worked with almost every major hosting provider out there in the past 16 months, and have learned quite a bit when it comes to identifying the strengths and weaknesses of blog hosting.

Here is a list of five things that Unique Blog Designs looks for when working with a hosting provider:

• Daily data backups
• Great customer service – both on the phone, and via email
• WordPress support and “one-click” installations
• Great bandwidth and robust server response
• Easy to use admin panel (C-Panel or Plesk)

To be honest, there is only one provider that we recommend for WordPress users. That would be Bluehost!

They contain all five of the characteristics seen above, and they aren’t too bad when it comes to pricing, too. We strongly recommend that you migrate to BlueHost, if you want to make things easy on yourself!

Who do you host with, and do you have any horror stories to share?

Although the UBD team has been on Twitter for quite a while now, we hadn’t setup a company account until now. We have a lot of exciting things planned for 2009 that will definitely surprise you!

In Q1 2009, we have something very special to show you and we will be announcing it first on Twitter. We also plan to use Twitter for exclusive contests, promotions and giveaways.

Our good friend and blogging mentor, Yaro Starak, has released the free Roadmap Report – which is a guide to becoming a successful blogger.

I know that when I started blogging, almost two years ago, I could have benefited HUGELY from reading a report such as this.

Yaro and his new partner, Gideon Shalwick, have also released a series of 10 free Become a Blogger Videos. The videos are easy to watch and very informative. If you are trying to grow your blog, I am sure you will find them worth watching.

In the Roadmap Report, Yaro promises to explain “how he stumbled upon the “X-Factor” For Blogging Success, and how it turned upside down everything he thought he knew about blogging….”

We’ve been following Yaro’s blogging methods for over a year now, and he is one of the few people that really understands how to grow a successful blog.

10 Easy To Follow Videos Showing You How To Create Your Blog From Scratch!

Tweeting has proven itself to be an incredibly useful and important tool for communication, rivaling both instant messaging and blogging. In fact, it’s almost a mixture of the two.

If you haven’t set up your free Twitter account, do so now here. You won’t regret it.

Blogging

Blogging allows you to reach out to those in your community as well as your potential customers on a personal level. This is one of the main advantages of having a blog. Your potential customers can get to know you and your company, before actually speaking with you. Thus, creating that much needed rapport.

Instant Messaging

For those of you who use instant messaging to communicate with friends, colleagues, and clients, you know that IMing is mostly informal. You don’t have to worry as much about being grammatically correct, spelling, etc. Instant messaging is largely direct communication with one other person.

Twitter – Bridging the gap between Blogging and IM

One of the most important aspects of using Twitter is the informality of connecting with others. It is not invasive to respond to someone’s tweet whom you have never met. Even if that person is a thought leader in your industry. In fact, I would recommend it (just don’t overdo it)!

Building relationships within your community can take your business to “the next level.” Twitter is a fantastic and informal way to do so. If you can strike up a conversation with a person over Twitter who has a large following, there is a good chance some of those followers will start following you.

You can also use Twitter to let your clients, colleagues, and friends know what you are up to throughout the day. It is a great way to stay connected with all of them.

My favorite aspect of Twitter, is the ability for me to get a peak into the lives and insights of those I respect. I am able to follow the leaders of my industry and others. This is actually quite amazing.

Most of the people that I follow provide a great deal of value to my day. Sometimes I am not able to read all of the blogs that I want to, but I am able to keep up with most everyone on Twitter.

Sending Traffic to Your Blog Via Twitter

As with writing a great tittle to your blog post, tweeting about your blog posts, requires the same attention to detail. You want to get those who are following you on Twitter to go read your posts right? Well, then make the tweet interesting and grab there attention.

One thing that you want to be careful of is not tweeting so much that you are seen as a spammer. Keep in mind that while Twitter is more informal that your blog, you should still be seeking to provide value and insights to your followers.

The more that you are involved with Twitter, as with most other things, the better results you will have. There are tons of really useful tools, such as Twitterrific, that help you manage and get the most out of your Twitter experience.

There are lots of different reasons why Twitter is having “hockey stick” growth right now, and I recommend you start using it as soon as possible.

Are you already using Twitter? If so, what tips do you have for new Twitter users?

Here is a list of popular blogs and tools about Twitter to help you get started:

• TwitTip – a blog all about Twitter written by Problogger
• Free Twitter Buttons
• Twitteriffic

P.S. Make sure you are following the UBD team on Twitter:

• Josh Mullineaux (that’s me)
• Matthew Blancarte
• Nate Whitehill

I recently had a chance to sit down and talk about copywriting for blogs with Allison Nazarian. Allison is the founder of Get It In Writing. Her business provides copywriting services, among other things, to bloggers! She also writes on her personal blog AllisonNazarian.com

Allison has worked, written and consulted for hundreds of publications and organizations, including Bloomberg News, J. Walter Thompson, Ruder-Finn, Business Wire and a wide range of health, financial and law professionals, women’s organizations, service providers, communications companies and individuals.

In this podcast, we go over topics such as business blogging practices, choosing the right topics, and optimum posting frequency.

Click the PLAY button below to listen to the podcast. Enjoy, and feel free to leave any questions in the comments.