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How to Create a Versatile and Effective Logo
When you create your logo, you will be developing a symbol or a stylish way of writing your company name that you will subsequently use to represent the entirety of your brand. As you can imagine, this is an important consideration as you are going to be using that image in every piece of marketing and on every product and service you put out.
So it needs to be good. The question is; how do you make sure it is?
Brainstorming The Idea
Coming up with a killer idea is going to be the most difficult part to start with but there are a few ways you can get over that blank screen staring back at you.
The first is to look for inspiration. Create a mood board by collecting anything that gives you ideas or that you like the looks of. At the same time, draw down all the related images and symbols that you associate with your industry or niche.
The next thing you can do is to try combining that imagery in various ways alongside your company name written in various fonts. Don’t be afraid at this stage to try absolutely anything – just throw out every idea and see what sticks. You will eventually end up with a few different designs which you can then decide upon by asking around. As a rule, the simpler ones are preferable as they will prove to be more versatile ultimately.
It’s worth noting at this stage that the colors you choose are likely to affect the coloring of your website, of your products and more – so don’t choose a color that’s too garish!
Creating Your Logo
To actually create your logos, you need to use vector software, the most popular example of which is Adobe Illustrator. This software has the advantage of creating images that you can subsequently edit with ease and which you can scale to any size with no loss of quality.
You might find in future that you need to use different versions of your logo. For instance, if your logo is white and it needs to appear on a white background, then you might have to invert it or make it a light grey. Illustrator will allow you to do this quickly and easily, as will having a relatively straightforward and simple logo to begin with. Follow this advice then and you’ll be able to ensure your branding works in as many different situations as possible.
If you want to know more about branding and how it can fit into YOUR business, take a look at this FREE video here
Content Marketing Strategy To Establish Authority In Your Niche
Once you’ve created a brand for yourself, the next job is to start making that brand recognisable by creating a reputation around it that will encourage people to seek you out and to (hopefully) order more of your products and services. The idea here is to establish your brand to the point where people consider your logo and/or your name to be a ‘guarantee of quality’ so that they know they can trust you. People will then seek you out to get your opinion and at that point, selling will become a LOT easier. This is essentially how you become an authority and a thought leader for your chosen subject matter.
One of the best ways to reach this point is through content marketing. This means publishing content on your site and on other channels that will demonstrate your knowledge and gradually help you to build a name for yourself.
The mistake that a lot of bloggers and business owners make here is in thinking that they can build that name for them with just one or two posts. But in reality the ‘process’ of content marketing and of building trust is a long term strategy.
These are the steps that any blog must go through to become an authority in the eyes of any one customer…
- A visitor finds a blog post by accident and reads it, finds it valuable and entertaining. They then leave your site and give you no further thought.
- They then come across another blog post and finds it this one entertaining too. Now they might make a note of your website name/brand.
- They then find your blog a few more times and eventually come to think of you as someone they can trust on a particular subject. They may actively start to look around the rest of your site at this point and may even subscribe to your mailing list.
- In future, when they are looking for information about a given topic, they will specifically search for your website or business name along with their question because they believe they can trust your answer.
- At this point they now consider you an industry leader and if you suggest something for them to buy they will be more likely to trust your judgement and make a purchase.
As you can see, a content marketing strategy is a long process and is predicated on you delivering consistently high quality content for a long time! But it will be worth it in the long run.
Build A Blog And Make Money Part 2
Optimize Your Settings
Most default settings are perfect, but there are a few things you want to do to ensure that your site performs at its best. Go through the sidebar on your blog dashboard and check each area to make sure everything is filled out.
Under Settings and General, add the name of your site and a tagline. Set your timezone and make sure the other elements are how you prefer the.
Under Settings and Writing, scroll down to where it says Update Services and add a list of ping sites that you want notified whenever your site has fresh content. You can find recommended sites online, so just cut and paste that list in there.
Under Settings and Reading, make sure your blog is set to show the Latest content, not a static page. Remember, when people land, they may not be bloggers themselves, so they might quickly glance to see if you have fresh content and, not realizing that it’s a set static page, assume you haven’t blogged in a long time and leave.
Make the settings show a few posts, such as 5 and the syndication feed much more, like 55. In the feed, choose to show the full text. Double check to make sure the Search Engine Visibility is UNchecked. You don’t want to block search engines from visiting your site.
Under Settings and Discussion, check to allow people to comment on new articles, make them fill out their name and email, enable threaded comments, and choose to manually approve and get notifications whenever anyone posts a comment.
Under default Avatar, choose Gravatar. This is where most people have their avatar registered. Go to Gravatar.com and use the same email address as you use for the site. Upload a headshot so that your blog readers can build that trusted bond with you and put a face to the name.
Under Settings and Permalinks, it should be defaulted correctly, but you want to make sure it uses this format:
http://www.yourdomain.com/sample-post
You don’t want to use the official default where it uses ?p=123 instead of the sample-post style because you want the URL of your blog posts to include the keywords in your title. Just glancing at it, you can see which is helpful to both humans and search engines:
http://www.yourdomain.com/how-to-stop-panic-attacks
versus…
http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=1077
The first one is clear. The second could be any topic under the sun.
In part 3 we will look at plugins…
Build A Blog And Make Money Part 1
When you pick a niche and have a domain, you want to move to the next step and start creating your site. Many newbies want to know whether they need a website or a blog.
Static sites are great for narrow topics like a little minisite where you’re reviewing one particular coffeemaker and you want a page on brewing tips, a page on the specs of the machine, a page on comparisons with another coffeemaker, etc.
They’re also great for service providers like freelancer ghostwriters who want a page of samples, a page of testimonials, a page of rates, etc. But for most marketers, who are leading a niche, you want a blog.
Blogs provide freshness that Google (and humans) crave. As long as you stay committed to the topic and post on it continually, it will be an evolving online entity that grows in authority over time. Don’t worry about the thought of continual content – we’ll address that later.
For now, let’s just talk about the important elements you need to remember when you have a blog platform and want to profit from it. Before you get started, set your domain up with hosting and then log into your hosting account’s cpanel.
Click on QuickInstall and then WordPress and follow the prompts to install your blog. Ideally, your blog will be located at yourdomain.com – but some of you may have future plans to put a squeeze page on yourdomain.com, so you might want your blog installed at yourdomain.com/blog – either will work.
Once you have it installed, log into your WordPress dashboard. It will always be located at yourdomain.com/wp-admin. It’s time to set it up for maximum authority and monetization!
Install An Appropriate Theme
If you’re a newbie with deep pockets and want to start out with a premium paid theme, more power to you! But it’s completely not necessary. Free themes that are built into WordPress are great starts and you can always upgrade your theme and keep everything intact at any time in the future.
What you want to watch out for is downloading free themes off the Internet randomly. These often have things you don’t want in there, like hard to find links to seedy websites. Just keep in mind that nothing is totally free – they have a reason they put that out for the masses to use.
A better way to do it is to choose a free theme from those already installed. So in your dashboard click on Appearances and then Themes. You’ll see a variety of themes if you click on Add New.
You can sort by Featured, newest, Recently Updated – or check off theme specifics you want, like colors, columns, layout, features and subject. But there are some things you want to make sure you get.
Unless your blog is a photography-based blog, you want one where text is showcased more than images on the home page. It’s good to have some images, but not just images.
You also want a theme where the header doesn’t take up the entire “above the fold” area. The above the fold area is everything you see before have you to start scrolling down the page.
You want your above the fold area to show your header, navigation bar and the first snippet of the latest blog post as well as the sidebar that has your opt in form and freebie item in sight.
So you might notice the Twenty-Eleven theme has a huge header – takes up almost he whole screen. But the Twenty-Ten is much smaller. You can also upload your own theme if you want to.
There are some newbies who plan to launch an affiliate site for Amazon so they consider going with a specific review theme. That’s okay – as long as it’s not some automated system that simply pulls content in to your site.
In order to truly succeed, you want unique content with a personal style, not scraper sites that simply grab text from elsewhere. People don’t trust that. You might get the traffic, but when a consumer is looking for a review, they can tell the difference between a personalized post and scraped content.
In part 2 we will look at optimizing your settings…