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Erin Ferree's Articles Internet Marketing Entrepreneur Small Business Online Business Ezines SEO Email Webmaster Web Design Promotion Advertising Business Display Category|Title|Newest|Oldest 13 Tips for Finding a Graphic Designer Are you ready to hire someone to design your logo, collaterals, or artwork for your website? Well, here's just the information you need to get the best results from hiring your first (or your first successful) graphic designer. To assure that we begin on the same page, a graphic designer designs your marketing materials — the print- and web-ready art which are then turned over to a printer or coded for the web for the final outcome. 15 Reasons Small Businesses Need a Brand Identity System Business and marketing experts urge small business owners to "brand" their businesses with a logo and a set of consistent marketing materials — a brand identity system. But they rarely explain the reasons behind this advice. A logo and consistent marketing materials can increase your sales and revenue, because they convey the following impressions... 5 Easy Ways to Establish Your Brand Online The Internet is a practical and accessible tool to build your brand. Here, we list 5 of the easiest ways to leverage the Internet to your best advantage: 9 Keys to an Effective Logo The right logo, with the right characteristics, will boost your visibility, credibility and memorablity – which means more business for you! These characteristics include... 9 Keys to an Effective Website Many small companies choose not to invest in a professionally designed website, although a well-designed Web site may raise the company's level of professionalism and exposure – AND drive business and sales! 9 Tips for Getting the Best Work From Your Graphic Designer A graphic designer's goal is to provide you with the logos, artwork and page designs that best fit your business, personality, industry, and target market and conveys your offerings and differentiators. The experience of reaching that goal can be extremely smooth and pleasant if you know what to expect upfront, and if you understand that you do need to work with your designer, as opposed to just letting them loose to create with little input. A Logo Without Your Name... Can Be A Big Branding Pain! Why a small business shouldn't design a logo that's only a symbol (like Nike's swoosh). Building a One-page Website You've designed your logo, and you're ready to print your business cards and other marketing collateral materials. You want to include your website address (also called a URL) to build your credibility. However, you're not quite ready to write and design a full website. What to do? Business Card Basics Making a great first impression often begins with your business card. Your business card is typically the first of your marketing materials that a new client will see. It should clearly tell your client who you are and what you do at first glance. Define Your Difference To Stand Out and Make Your Business Shine Thoughtfully defining your business—and your differentiation—will help you to understand who you are, what you do, and what makes you different. Not many small businesses take the time to answer those core questions about their business, but those answers are essential to creating a strong brand identity, focused messaging, and effective marketing materials. Designing Your Email Newsletter Another commonly-asked question is how to design the newsletter to make it the most effective. This breaks down into several questions and considerations: Focus Your Definition You have so much important information that soon all of your marketing materials are crammed full of text and information. Most small business owners have this problem. They are so excited about their business and everything they can do for their clients. They make the mistake of putting it all into their marketing materials. Follow Up With Your Clients A follow-up tool such as a post card, HTML newsletter, or note card is essential to make sure that your services stay "top-of-mind" with the people that you meet. It's said that a prospect needs to hear from you seven times before they will make a purchase. So it's important to create tools and a system to enable you to followup with your prospects once you've made that initial connection. Font Basics for Branding Your Small Business You've designed your logo. Now you need to create some great marketing pieces to promote your business. But what pieces to create? There are so many options available that it can be difficult to decide which pieces will be the strongest and best way to publicize your business. No matter what that business is, we recommend these pieces as a first step toward marketing it. Get Your Website Launched! There are many elements in a website design project. Elements may include the overall strategy, the site map, site contents, design, coding, and more. It's tempting to keep tinkering and adjusting the various components until they're perfect. But you should remember that while you're editing the website, it stays on your designer's temporary server for testing or on your desktop — and never gets launched. Good Design Doesn't Get Done In A Day: Part 1 of 2 Lead time is one of the most often overlooked aspects of a design project. For some projects it's not a huge concern — you just need to get your designs reasonably quickly so you can start marketing. You should expect quick service from any designer. Good Design Doesn't Get Done In A Day: Part 2 of 2 With all of these considerations, it might seem that you need to start planning your design project many months in advance of your event. But the truth is that a lot of these steps can be done quickly. It still is advisable to allow as much time as possible to address each step thoroughly and without rushing the project. If you follow this method your finished design will usually be better and more effective. How A Strong Brand Identity Helps Overcome Customer Reluctance Many small businesses, especially one-person businesses, don't see the point in investing the time, work and money in creating a brand identity. After all, they're very good at whatever it is that they do, and they should be able to make more than "just a living" by simply putting up a website, being themselves, and delivering a high-quality service, right? How Search Engine Optimization Helps Small Businesses You've probably heard people talking about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, and wondered if it would help your business. The answer, in short, is absolutely! How to Make Sure Your Website Won't Need a Do-Over When you were young, do-overs were an easy way to resolve an argument, fix unfairness or quickly change history. Why wouldn't you want to be able to do this with your business website? Unlike the playground game, designing a website takes a lot of time, work and money — it's just not a task that you're going to want to start over from scratch again! How to Make Your Website Search-Engine Friendly One of your ultimate goals when creating your small business website will be to ensure that the website can be found by clients and prospects using Internet search engines (for example, Google, Yahoo!, and so forth). But there's not a lot of understandable information available about what the average small business owner can do to improve the number of search engine "hits" their websites get. How To Stand Out At A Trade Show If you're setting up a display at a trade show, you have to do more than just pay for a booth space, put on a nice outfit that morning, and walk in the door for your company to get real results. You have to think about how you'll cut through all the "noise" to get in touch with your target audience. How Your Business Should Act Like A Snowflake Just like snowflakes, your business will have several different types of uniqueness. On the surface, you'll want your brand and marketing materials to look unique, so that when all of your materials go out, they can stand out from your competitions'. Logo Files: Versions of your logo that you should own Your logo is the most important graphic element in which you will invest for your business. You should own the logo in many file formats. Having a library of logo files will enable you to send vendors the types of files they need (for example, other designers, printers, or other service providers). No Logo?: Launching a Business Without a Logo Can Sabotage You The initial lack of customers and cash flow often causes new small business owners to put off designing a logo and marketing materials professionally "until they get a few clients" or "until they get started." Unfortunately, designing their own marketing materials when they launch their businesses instead of having them professionally created will make getting those initial clients more difficult. Rebranding Is an Excuse to Party in Your Business Once the redesign is done, many small businesses launch it silently. They change their logos, business cards, and websites one day—sometimes without so much as an announcement or a "By the way... " to their customers. Not only are they potentially confusing and alienating them, but they're also missing out on a great excuse to party! Signs It's Time To Redesign Your Company's Brand When you first start a small business, you create your brand based on your hopes and plans for the future of the company. Sometimes this is based on experience, but more often than not it's based on a guess. Then once you actually start doing business, you may find that your business isn't following the same path you set out on. Signs It's Time To Redesign Your Website Designing your first website is a stressful undertaking. It requires you to dig deep into your business in order to write the copy for your site. You need to work with a designer and go through the process of creating a site that looks unique and works well. And finally, after all that, you're finished and it's time for the site to go live. Unfortunately, websites don't last forever. Stop Making Excuses. Your Website Must Match Your Other Marketing Materials At first glance the title of this article sounds obvious — that your website would look like all your other marketing materials. Of course that's just something that would have to happen, right? But I run into more and more entrepreneurs who want to break this rule. Creating a website that looks significantly different from all of your other marketing materials just tends to be a bad idea. The 9 Advantages to Using a Visual Vocabulary in Brand Identity Design Visual elements are a major part of your business's brand identity design. The keystone of that design is the logo, but in many cases, the logo isn't enough to convey all of your brand attributes. A visual vocabulary is a way to reinforce and add to the messaging that is contained in your logo. The Art of Website Maintenance Now that you've designed and launched your website, you have a powerful marketing tool for your business. But, your website is only as useful as the content is current. The process of keeping the content on your site current is called website maintenance, and it's important to keep both visitors and search engines supplied with new information. The Building Blocks of Visual Vocabulary: Consistency Your Visual Vocabulary consists of the secondary design elements that are used in conjunction with your logo to form your brand identity. Your Visual Vocabulary is composed of the graphics, font styles, colors, and even the type of paper you choose. Once you have determined the elements to use in your Visual Vocabulary, it is important to use those elements consistently throughout all of your marketing materials. The Building Blocks of Visual Vocabulary: Flexibility Just like the sidekicks help out a superhero, your Visual Vocabulary together with your logo helps put the kapow into your brand identity. These Visual Vocabulary "sidekicks" are the graphics, font styles, colors, and layouts you use in your materials, and even the type of paper you print your materials on. One of the best features of a Visual Vocabulary is its flexibility. The Domino Effect of Changing Your Logo It's a rainy afternoon and you've got a hot cup of tea and a box of dominoes. You set them up on end, one next to the other in a snaking line across your dining room table. Then you bump the first domino and watch as the rest fall down, one after the other. The Great Two-Sided Business Card Debate A business card is one of the most important marketing pieces that you'll develop for your company, since it is typically the first piece of your marketing materials that a new client will see. One of the most debated points in business card design is whether to print information on just one side of the card or to use both sides. There are many views on this controversy, and here are some that we frequently hear. The Layers of Your Brand Branding is a hot topic in marketing these days, but it's defined in different ways and looked at from different angles. There are many components that make up a brand, and we call each component a Brand Layer. The Search Engine Trinity Like Cajun food, getting a small business listed on the search engines also is based on a trinity of components. These components give your search engine efforts a base to be built off of, and ensure that you'll be successful. Those are: the ease of getting listed, the effectiveness of your listing, and then finally, the level of placement. The Truth About Your Competition There's more to identifying The Competition than just finding other businesses that offer similar services to yours. Three Brand Identity Myths That Will Bring Your Business Down "Brand identity" is the combination of consistent visual elements that are used in your marketing materials. A basic brand identity kit consists of a logo, business card, letterhead, and envelope. It can be extended to include a Web site, brochure, folder, flyer, or any other professionally designed pieces. Many business owners have misconceptions about brand identities that can damage their businesses. Time to "Get Over" the Rainbow (in your logo, that is) Ah, rainbows. They're beautiful things, stretching across the sky, like Mother Nature apologizing for wet, nasty weather. It's no wonder that so many people love them. But, love can quickly turn to hate if you use a many-colored palette in your business brand. Types of Logos: Text, Symbol and Combination Logos There are three basic types of logos: text, symbol, and combination logos. The type of logo that will work best for your company depends on a number of considerations, such as the size of your company, the uniqueness of your name, and a variety of other factors. What Rushing Your Design Project Really Means If you don't plan to allow enough time for your project to be designed, printed and delivered, then you may still be able to have your project completed in time, but the design will have to be rushed. This means that your designer will put aside other client's work and work late nights, even weekends, to get your project out - but at a price. And the price takes several forms other than just financial. Where to put your contact info on a trifold brochure When you're designing a trifold brochure, you have to put your contact information someplace on the brochure. The only question is, where? Why Entrepreneurs Divorce Their Logos (And Why It's A Bad Idea) Remember how excited you were when you first designed your logo? How beautiful you thought it was, and how you couldn't wait to get your first batch of business cards printed so you could show it off? How you excitedly described its meaning and subtleties to your mom (and your clients?) And the rush to the trademark office to get your new love "made official"—what excitement when the papers finally arrived! Why Isn't Your Website Working Well? One of the biggest problems that small businesses face is ineffective websites. A website is often one of the largest start-up marketing expenses for a small business; unfortunately, many small businesses never see a return on that investment. Why do most websites have this problem? And how can you fix it? Why Starting A Relationship With The Search Engines Can Be Hard ...Search Engines have a lot in common with singles. They've been hurt, and they aren't so quick to trust any more. Why You Need To Get An Email Newsletter Service An email newsletter is one of the most convenient and easy ways to keep in touch with your clients and prospects. So you've made the decision to design an email newsletter to use as your follow up tool in your brand design toolkit? The next decision is how to manage the newsletter from a technical perspective. Why You Won't Get Instant Gratification From the Search Engines and What to Do About It So, when it's time to get your website listed on the search engines, it's only natural for you to want to be up on Google right away. I can't tell you how many emails I've gotten from clients right after I've let them know that their site is launched, saying "But, I Googled myself, and I'm not there! Why not?" Why your Business Brand Shouldn't Be An Exact Mirror Image Of You Customers and prospects are more concerned about their needs, their businesses, and their situations than they are about how good you are. What they want to know is how you're going to help them. And if you're a one-person business, they're likely to be more concerned about the fact that you're the only one there rather than being thrilled about your experience. Your Small Business's Search Engine Ranking Emergency No one wants an emergency—but if you've got one on your hands, it's good to know the steps to take to "stabilize the patient." If your small business emergency is that your website isn't showing up on the search engines, there a couple of steps you can take right now. 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