Top Qualities of a Good Logo Design
A good logo design can mean the difference between business success and failure; it really is that simple. Through the history of branding, companies who accelerate their brands to a higher level often have a memorable logo which not only sells their brand best, but also creates an attraction and recognition between the company and the customer.
A good logo will include four specific design elements:
Simple
A quality logo needs to be simple in design. A simple logo is easy to recognize, and is often the easiest way to tell the customer what their brand is all about. A simple logo will also attract the eyes of a potential customer even when surrounded by dozens of competitors as well. A great example of a very simple but highly memorable logo is the Nike Swoosh or the Oakley Sunglasses ‘O’. These long lasting images were developed very simply and implied the age old K.I.S.S. concept; KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID.
Memorable
A great logo needs to be very memorable once viewed by a potential customer. By memorable, we mean that it should burn a place in the viewer’s memory the instant they see your logo. This can be accomplished by design elements including font, script, color and even size. If I ask you to think of a logo with the colors Red and Yellow, what is the first thing that comes into your mind? How about Red and White? If you answered McDonald’s and Coke, you and 2.3 Billion customers would agree.
Timeless
Speaking of timeless, let’s take a look at that Coke logo again. Over the years, the same brand logo, originally created in 1885 has stood as the corporate identity of this beverage giant. Their major competitors Pepsi Co. have gone through 11 different logos in nearly the same time period. This tells me that the Coke logo is timeless.
Versatile
Any logo worth its weight in salt must be versatile for multiple uses. If your logo is black on white background, what would it look like on a dark background? How about size? Would your logo be appropriate and easy to identify if it was the size of a postage stamp or if it was attached to the side of a car? Make sure your logo design can be used for multiple applications.
WordPress Vs. Blogger Blogs For Online Businesses
For both bricks and motor and online businesses, Blogger blogs used to be a handy tool in 2005. However, WordPress changed the entire game plan.
Having a blog on your website is a great investment. As well as being a fantastic promotional tool and a way to keep in touch with your customers regularly, blogging has search engine optimisation (SEO) benefits, and also allows you to highlight new products and services to both people and search engines by deep-linking directly to a product. By keeping your blog on your own domain name, instead of blogger.com, you reap the full benefits.
When we talk about the WordPress Vs. Blogger debate, WordPress would always take the edge. As well as being on your own domain for the above reasons, a self-hosted WordPress blog gives you far more flexibility than Blogger, or even one on WordPress.com.
One of the best features of WordPress that helps this along is plugins and widgets. A way to add functionality, widgets has been a strong feature for WordPress users because they can simply add a couple of different widgets through the admin panel to enhance and customize their website’s front end, or add in a new feature or ability.
As well as powering a blog, did you know thatWordpress can be used as a content management system to power your whole site, not just your blog. This is nowhere near as simple and clean with Blogger. Our whole site here is powered by WordPress, not just this blog.
If you’re looking forward to establishing your own online business, multimediART are the WordPress experts. We offer both WordPress website design packages for both customising and existing theme, or we can design and create you your very own unique WordPress theme from scratch. We can also make plugins to enhance functionality, or simply install WordPress if you’d like to try your hand at setting up your own blog.
Search Engine Optimisation: What’s It All About?
SEO (search engine optimisation) is one of the topics I get asked about most, second only to ecommerce lately. With so many new online businesses starting up in 2011, how well you handle your SEO can make or break your success online.
In a nutshell, SEO is optimising your website to make it rank well in search engines for your keywords. This includes both ‘on page’ and ‘off page’ techniques. If you haven’t already seen my SEO info services, it’s worth taking a look here.
A lot of biz owners I talk to have heard of SEO, but they’re not sure what it’s all about, or have read so much and don’t know where to start. Hopefully this infographic will help summerise things for you, and if you’re new to SEO, help get you started.
If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment on this post and I’ll reply right back. I’d love to help you out with your SEO queries 
.
Marketing Using your Facebook Fan Page
If you’re yet to integrate a Facebook fan page into your online marketing strategy, then you definitely need to get a Facebook fan page now! Facebook is more widely used than a lot of small businesses know, and not just by teens either.
Here are some of the statistics:
- Half of all the active Facebook users log into their accounts every single day
- The average Facebook user spends about 55 minutes a day
- Facebook has approximately 350,000,000 users
- Facebook users are averagely aged at 37, with 61% of them being either older or middle-aged
With these figures to consider, it is hard to think of a reason why your business should not make use of Facebook. In addition, Facebook and other social media is now being used as part of your Google rank, making it an essential online marketing tool.
To help you come up with a most effective way of marketing your Facebook fan page, here are tips to keep you at the top of your game.
Always Keep your Content Fresh
By updating information on your website, you increase your chances of having repeat traffic. Updating website content does not require a lot of effort, it can be a blog post or a quick status update. As a way to market your business online, you should take advantage of not only your Facebook fan page, but also try integrating other social media tools such as twitter or photo sharing sites. This is highly possible and effective with very little effort. For instance, you should:
- update blog posts on your Facebook wall occasionally by making use of tools such as Pingomatic
- setup widgets for Flickr and your YouTube channel to automatically add posts onto your Facebook wall
Interact with New Traffic
For first-time potential clients who will be visiting your Facebook fan page, the wall might seem a bit exclusive and intimidating. For this reason, it is extremely important that you try and interact with these new customers. I recommend that you direct new customers to a landing page that has key information about your products and services. You can then ask them to become members of your Facebook fan page.
Offer your Fans an Incentive
There many incentives that businesses can use to grow their fan base. These are used to entice Facebook users to become your fans. For instance:
- exclusive coupons for products
- weekly special that will be promoted on your fan page
- providing free shipping for your Facebook fans
Having a contest on Facebook
One way to increase value to your Facebook fan page is by providing incentives to fans. One such incentive is by having a contest on your Facebook page for your fans. However, you need to be familiar with Facebook guidelines regarding contests on fan walls before initiating such a contest.
If you’re not sure how to take the next step with your Facebook fan page, you can order a Facebook Marketing Plan for your business here. For $50, you’ll get a full report on your Facebook fanpage, including 10 posting ideas for your business and a weekly schedule to help you plan your facebook marketing.
Social Media Marketing Tips
If you operate an online business today, many of your customers, despite their gender, economic status or age, are probably very active in social media sharing and social networks.
- Facebook users are averagely aged at 37, with 61% of them being either older or middle-aged
- social users between the ages of 18 and 24 do not dominate any social networking site
- females and males are almost at par in terms of how much they use social networking sites
Chances are that you will miss out on marketing your online business if you do not know which social networking channels your potential customers spend most of their time using. In recent days social networking sites are among the fastest ways that any online business can acquire new customers.
To help you out, here are some tips that will help you use social networking sites to the advantage of your online business.
First, you need to know what your competitors are doing.
Whether you need to take your efforts and social media marketing up a notch or are new to this area of marketing, you should make use of competitive intelligence. This means that you need to take time evaluating what your top competition is doing on social media. This should include:
- what social sites they use
- the types of content that they publish on social media sites
- the number of views and/or followers that they have on the site
- take note of the programs, events, and/or products they promote using social media
To get more ideas on what works well with social media marketing, take a look at what other successful online businesses in other niches are doing.
Follow Your Customers
In order to effectively market your online business using social media, you need to choose the right social conduits to market yourself. To do this, it’s a good idea to ask your existing and potential clients what social media websites they like to use. In addition to this, you may use tools that will help you monitor social sites and give you an idea of how your brand is viewed. These could either be free tools such as Trackur or Social Mention. For more robust results, you can also use commercial tools such as Radian6.
Don’t Over Promote
Yes, the main aim of your online business is to sell a certain product or service however, this does not mean that you should push promotions and products on your customers. Your social media marketing strategy needs to cover a broader number of techniques than simply trying to promote offers. By including some amount of significant engagement with your potential clientele you are most likely to experience success.
Website Success: 5 Tips To Improve Your Site
Launching your new business website is very exciting, and a lot of work. After all those hours preparing your site, the big launch day is always a great achievement. Now you can just sit back and wait for the sales to come. Or can you?
A lot of business owners make the same mistake when they build their first website, or they add a significant new feature like a shopping cart – they think their website will immediately start to get visitors and sales. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work like that. Websites should be treated as almost a living entity – they need ongoing care and maintenance if you’re going to achieve your goals.
Continue reading Website Success: 5 Tips To Improve Your Site…
How to Market Your Business on Facebook
If you are looking to market your business through Facebook, there are some strategies out there that can help but that many small business owners may not have heard of. Regardless of what business you’re in, these strategies may prove helpful in getting the word out about your products and services. Below are some tips and tools to improve your business marketing on Facebook.
Like all marketing, your Facebook marketing efforst should be planned and complement your website, branding and other marekting efforts. We offer a health check for your Facebook marketing to make sure you’re making the most of your time and efforts. Before embarking on the below, check out our personalised Facebook Marketing plans.
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Has anyone visited your blog lately?
So you’ve been blogging for awhile now and have several posts, and perhaps even some killer content on pages. Trouble is, you don’t know if anyone other than your friends are reading it. Fortunately, there are some small steps you can take to drive traffic to your blog, and soon you’ll have more visitors dropping by, more comments being posted and hopefully more enquiries and sales!
Getting traffic to a blog follows the same steps as getting traffic to a website, with a few other possibilities thrown in. Don’t concentrate on one method because traffic can, and should, come from all over.
10 Ways to Get Blog Traffic
Here are my top 10 tips on how to gain quick blog traffic.
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What’s a keyword and what do I do with it?
I often get requests from clients to increase their ranking in Google, or get them on page one in the search engines. Trouble is, most small business owners I speak to haven’t thought about what keyword they’re wanting to increase their ranking or get on page one for.
When you go to Google, for example, you aren’t instantly presented with a list of websites. Instead, you search for the terms you’re looking for, and you’re presented with a list of what Google considers to be the best sites for those terms.
When optimising your website, that term typed into Google is your keyword or keyphrase, and that is what you should be always thinking of when working on your website.
Continue reading What’s a keyword and what do I do with it?…
eCommerce Site Navigation
Did you know you’ve only got about three clicks from your homepage before a lot of people will give up and leave your site? Don’t you hate browsing an online store and having to click through through several web pages before you even see a picture of the product? Everyone else does too. If you want visitors to turn into customers, creating an eCommerce site that is easy to navigate is paramount.
With online stores become more popular, with larger ranges and more competition, good organisation on your site is now more important than every before. But, how can you make sure your site is well organised and also make it easy for your customers to quick reach the product they’re after?
