I haven’t written as many posts as I would have liked on this blog in the last couple of months. The reason? I have been creating an e-book which will be used as an incentive for join my mailing list. It’s ready now!

Why did I do this?

Many reasons … I wanted to do something a bit different; to showcase my own design of an interactive PDF; to get some extra exposure. But mostly, I want to take my site to the next level.

The subject matter of the e-book is something I’m passionate about – setting up and getting noticed with a self-hosted WordPress site; SEO, social media and blogging.

Five years ago I was waking up every morning wearily to do uncreative artwork in other people’s companies. After five years of blogging, I run my own company where I am habitually involved in incredibly creative and interesting work for the most amazing and wide-ranging group of clients.

The change I have seen in my own life is testimony to the power of blogging with a self hosted WordPress site. But creating a blog is one thing; developing a website which attracts regular traffic and returning visitors is quite another, and I have outlined every step I took to achieve this in the 35-page PDF.

I will write more about creating an interactive PDF and using it as an incentive for a mailing list in the blog. I created the PDF in InDesign and I used Vertical Response to sort out the list and the sign up form.

OK, so how do you get a copy?

Please follow this link below to my main sign up page where you will only have to fill in your email address (and, if you like, your first and last name).Then you will receive an email with a subscription link. After that you will receive another email which welcomes you to the list and has the link to the PDF.

I would be grateful for comments and I hope its helpful to some of you.

So, here’s the link:

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

If you have any sort of professional website I would advise you to include a testimonial page to promote your business. I think it’s always good to see if someone has been recommended and interesting to see by whom. It’s something that could separate you from the competition. Have a look at my client testimonials and let me know what you think! Here are a few things I picked up whilst doing it.

Choose the clients or customers

Gather a list of clients you have repeat business with. A successful business needs repeat customers so their opinions are the most useful – and they’re more likely to write a shining testimonial! Remember that some companies have a non-endorsement corporate policy. Of course we have to respect that.

Send the email

Word your email very carefully. It’s more usual for your clients to ask you for favors not the other way round. Here is a copy of the email I sent:

I am compiling a client testimonials page on my website so I’m sending this email to a few of my clients.

Client testimonials are only worth doing if they are believable and done well. I would therefore like to ask you for the following information and your permission to publish it on my site. If there is anything or all of the following that you would not like me to put on my site I will, of course, completely understand.

What I would like from you:
Your name
Your company’s name (or companies’ names!)
Your job title
Your photo – Again, as with everything else, I will completely understand if you would not be happy with this. The reason I ask is that I think a photo will add to the believability element. I will make them really, really small.
Your company’s website (or websites)
Your testimonial about me – if you’re too busy or don’t want to write one I can get something from an email you’ve sent me and get back to you so you can approve the use of the quote

What you will get in return:
A warm fuzzy feeling of having done someone a good turn
A link to your website

I can’t stress enough that I don’t want you to be compelled to do anything. I would completely understand if you didn’t want to take part.

If you decide to reply I will seek your final approval either immediately before or immediately after I publish the testimonial page.

What to ask for

Notice I asked for some extra information besides just the testimonial. There were many reasons for this. I asked my clients for their company name, link and job description as these will be of primary importance to the client. Some clients may not want the link back to their website due to their endorsement policy. Some clients, on the other hand, may be glad of the link and may want to specify keywords to be put in the name of their company.

Another reason to ask for all this extra information is realism. The more details you add to the testimonial the more “real” it looks. We’ve all seen cheap looking testimonials on e-commerce sites where AJ from New York says “fab product”! I think the testimonial is more believable with the client’s full name, job description, company, link and photo.

What you write

Some people may advise to keep the testimonials short and snappy. I elected to publish them almost verbatim. The reason for this again was the realism it evoked. Some clients had written about me in the 2nd person, some in the 3rd person. I resisted the temptation to make them consistent. And, afterall, these guys had taken time to do me a favor. The least I could do was to quote them properly!

But I also added another section that wasn’t received from the client. The description of the work I’d done was written by me as it is a great excuse to promote my skills. Although I was honest about the work I had done for these clients, I made sure it included as much variety as possible to show the world what I can do: website design, website development, hosting and maintenance; interactive PDFs; print advertising design; HTML emails; brochures, newsletters, flyers… here I go again!

What I learned

There’s another reason for doing this apart from crude self-publicity. It’s always important to listen to your clients. And even more important to listen to what your biggest clients think. I learnt a lot from this experience. Have a look at my testimonial from one of my clients Benoît Quémar, Vice President of Alenea:

Many graphic or web designers, unfortunately, only have a talent for pure design in a “visual” way but fail to understand the purpose of their work or are not really interested in the business behind the project. As a result, they require a lot of management before being able to deliver something that’s usable – at best. Whereas Rob has shown a true interest in everything we’ve done and his suggestions have always proven that he understood the “why” of everything, coming up with effective and creative designs and ideas on his own, saving us a lot of valuable time.

This, apart from being a great testimonial, also taught me a great deal about what this client, and maybe others, value. So doing a testimonial page can bring you pure gold in terms of useful information!

What do you think?

Have you got a testimonial page on your website? Or do you have testimonials spread out through your website? Can you add any tips to mine? What do you think of my testimonials?

And finally

Again, a big “Thank You” to all my clients for taking part.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

The site that seems to embody this transformation – at the moment! – is Twitter. Although Twitter’s growth seems to have leveled off in 2009 after recording a massive 752% growth in 2008, there no signs of it’s influence waning as this century nears its troublesome teenage years. Savvy businesses see money in Twitter: I recently tweeted that I’d had a bad experience with BT and, within a few hours, I got a tweet from them asking me what the problem was.

So if we have to engage with this social media how do we do it productively and without turning into some sort of anti-social geekia dullard? Here are a few pointers on how to organize your web-life amongst the blogs, wikis and social sites, create a consistent online image and sync up all the various parts of your online world.

Create your Avatar

And, no, I don’t mean head over to Pandora and consort with the Na’vi, I mean use a consistent image when you comment on blogs or on your profile page of various other sites. Head over to Gravatar (created by those awfully nice Automattic people that gave us WordPress) and upload a square (150 by 150 pixels should do it) image which will appear by your name when you comment on a blog. Keep this square JPG, GIF or PNG handy on your hard drive and use it every time you register for a forum or social networking or bookmarking site. That way you have a consistent visual sign that people will come to recognize and trust!

Connect your social bookmarking sites to tweet your faves

If you don’t use social bookmarking sites then you should. Sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, etc., are excellent ways of rank and store useful articles and to promote yourself. As with your tweets, don’t use these services to shamelessly promote only your blog posts. Use them to store articles that you find interesting and then you will earn a reputation for distributing interesting material in your niche and your blog posts will benefit.

The best thing about these sites is that you can link them up to your Twitter ID and therefore promote your post on both the social bookmarking site and Twitter at the same time. Digg and Delicious are especially good for this.

Tweet your latest blog posts and blog your latest tweets

(Bit of a no-brainer, obviously) Some people claim that blogging’s light has been faded by the more advanced social tools. However, I think macro-blogging (sorry!) can only grow from the surge of interest in Twitter’s micro-blogging service. So, to automatically tweet your latest posts use WP to Twitter. And use Twitter for WordPress to display your latest tweets on your blog.

Publish videos and photos and tweet them

With their value going from zero to over a billion dollars in under 2 years, YouTube were the understated social media success story of the last decade. Together with the more stylish Vimeo and Metacafe (which is easily synced with Facebook), video sites are a great way of promoting your brand. For photos, apart from TwitPic there’s the more popular Flickr. Once you have joined these sites remember to favorite other videos, channels, photos and photostreams so that yours are more likely to get seen. Embed your logo and/or website into the videos or images. Remember to always put your website address in your profile settings of all of these sites!

Sync up your LinkedIn and Facebook status with your Twitter feed

LinkedIn users can automatically feed their Twitter status updates to their LinkedIn status updates. Use the Twitter exporter to automatically post your Facebook status updates to Twitter.

URL shorteners

The most successful URL shortener is bit.ly, followed by ow.ly, most likely because they are newer and contain fewer characters. The least retweeted URL shorteners are the older and longer Tiny URL and TwitPic. I think Bitly is great because not only does it shorten URL and posts to Twitter it also provides great stats on the links.

Conclusion

With so many social media sites out there, all wanting your info and time, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and disheartened. As a general rule of thumb, lurk on these sites to see what they’ve got on the subjects that interest you. And then, once signed up (and linked to your main website), make sure you add articles, photos and videos of genuine interest from third parties as well as your own material.

What about you? Do you have any social media top tips that you’d like to share?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

You’ve got a beautiful website and blog and you want people to contact you, either by phone or email. What do you do? Everyone has a contact page on their website. OK, maybe not everyone, but you should have one, really. Here are some really important points to think about when you’re doing your contact page.

How to publish your email address online without getting spam

Spammers use software to crawl the internet to look for email addresses to spam to. This is why people have their email addresses as something like me [at] server.com or something like that to try to cloak the email address from the spammer.

But there’s better ways out there. For example there’s HTML clocking which uses HTML number codes for the ASCII characters.

<a href=”m&#97;ilto:&#97;&#98;c&#64;myhost&#46;&#99;om”> contact us</a>

Here is how the above HTML will look like in the browser: contact us

But even better is JavaScript cloaking of the email address and the mailto: tag.

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var username = "rob";
var hostname = "robcubbon.com";
var linktext = username + "@" + hostname;
document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:" + username + "@" + hostname + "?subject=Enquiry" + ">" + linktext + "</a>")
//--></script>

When put into the webpage it creates the clickable email address that will give you “Enquiry” in the subject field of the email. Go on, try it, you can send me an email if you want to:

If you are using WordPress you can happily paste this into the body of a page or post as long as you are using the HTML editor.

Warning: I can not guarantee that any of the above methods will not produce spam at all, just substantially less than if you published your email address uncloaked.

Contact form

But it always makes sense to give your visitors a choice and every website should also have a contact form. There are many different ways of doing these. One thing you need if you want one is PHP on your server.

If you are using WordPress I would recommend the Contact Form 7 plugin. If you are using a Linux server you can basically plug in this plugin and play with it.

However, things are slightly more complicated if you are working on a Windows IIS server. In this case I have found you need to use WP Mail SMTP plugin to get it to work.

Should I include my telephone number and address online?

Whether you include your telephone number and address is entirely up to you. I wouldn’t give out my address on my website for security reasons. I include a mobile number on my contact page and it hasn’t resulted in many problems. In the UK, if your phone rings once and hangs up and you’re wondering whether to call back, simply check the number in the WhoCallsMe website or even just Google the number. If it’s a premium rate scam someone will have posted up a warning about it. This has happened to me maybe 5 times in about 4 years.

How to design your contact page

Generally, I would say that you should put the link to your contact page as prominently as possible on all pages – preferably at the end of the top navigation. The contact page itself should be simple and well laid out. Here is my contact page, what do you think about it?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is a format used to publish frequently updated content from the web on the web. The RSS feed is your posts’ content without any of your website’s style so it will contain just the titles, body text and image paths of your posts. So you better make your image paths absolute not relative!

The benefit of RSS is the aggregation of your favorite websites from multiple sources in one place. RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader” or an “aggregator”, which can be on your browser or on your desktop.

How to set up a Feedburner feed

Google has bought FeedBurner, so you need to sign in to Google and then go to Feedburner and look for where it says something like “Burn a feed right this instant”. WordPress blogs already come with a feed so you can enter either your blog’s URL (eg: http://www.my-blog.com) or your blog’s feed (eg: http://www.my-blog.com/feed, http://www.my-blog.com/?feed=rss2), check a box if you are a podcaster and hit “Next”.

You will next be greeted with a page where you can change your feed title and feed address. Once you are satisfied with those hit “Next” again. After this there are further Feedburner options to choose from – most of which I ignore, it’s FeedBurner’s email subscription that rocks but I’ll come to that later!

Install the FeedBurner plugin

For the best results using FeedBurner with your self-hosted WordPress site, the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin is recommended. It will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.my-blog.com/feed/ or http://www.my-blog.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

WordPress settings

Feedburner can only handle feeds under 512K. In WordPress, make sure your feed doesn’t exceed this in the administration area, by going Settings > Reading, “For each article in a feed, show” – you can choose “Summary” although I like to have “Full text” and don’t put more than 50 in “Syndication feeds show the most recent” if you write long posts.

What is email subscription and how can you set it up?

Email subscription to your blog allows those who have signed up for it to receive your blog posts in their inbox. You can use Aweber to do this but I’ll show you how to do it for free with FeedBurner.

With your feed selected click the “Publicize” tab, then click “Email Subscriptions” on the left, making sure “Feedburner” is selected, and click “Activate”. This will then present you with some HTML code in the box which you will need to copy and paste somewhere in your website.

Once signed up a subscriber will receive your posts as emails shortly after they are published. Google/FeedBurner handles all the backend work – subscribers verify themselves by email and have the option of unsubscribing at the bottom of every email they receive.

Design your posts so they look great as an email

Underneath the “Email Subscriptions” link in FeedBurner whilst in the “Publicize” tab there is another link entitled “Email Branding”. Do spend some time on this page formatting text, headings and links – you can specify the font, size and color. You can also add your logo and specify the title of the email.

Advertise the RSS feed and email subscription on your website

On my website I advertise the RSS feed with the familiar RSS icon which is linked to my FeedBurner feed. And I use the familiar email icon which takes you to the page where you can subscribe to my posts by email. I’ve also got some general information about feeds on this page so that my readers can decide which is the best way for them to subscribe to my blog.

What’s the benefit of RSS and email subscription?

They are both fantastic marketing tools. RSS brings in traffic as it is, for some people, an easy way of reading a site’s content. Email subscription can work like a weekly newsletter to your subscribers with a link back to your site. A subscriber is always worth more than a visitor because, more often than not they will return to your site again and again. The added advantage of the email subscribers is that you have the list of their email address’s although I wouldn’t advocate sending them much in the way of extra mail.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

How long has it been since you first used the internet? How much have your habits of information gathering changed since then? If you’re anything like me a myriad of different interests discovered on the internet crowd your mind as well as the exciting new ways you find out about them.

The future is on the internet not in print?

So is the internet the future of communication and print as relevant to the the 21st century as the horse is to modern transport?

Well, print is tangible, of course, and that gives it a sense of permanence in a fast-changing world.

If the printed book was launched today it would be described as completely platform-independent, requiring no special software, hardware or electric power to use, more portable than any laptop, does not have to be upgraded, might last a careful user their entire lifetime, and costs less than $15!

If I’m excited about a new subject and really want to learn or to get my teeth into something – I’ll always go to Amazon to try to pick up a cheap book to read.

Technology was supposed to replace paper. But that hasn’t happened. Every country in the western world uses more paper today, on a per-capita basis, than it did ten years ago.

So, there is a place for print design. But where?

Paul Simpson makes the point that print has changed enormously since Gutenberg fiddled with movable type nearly 570 years ago. And will change again. He says that key decision makers – those who don’t surf the web, never open links in emails and are unlikely to stumble across your website – are more successfully targeted by a printed piece of marketing rather than an online one.

If you’re trying to reach out to people who don’t know your business – or do know it and have already decided you stink – the printed product still has a cache, prestige and charisma that the internet can, as yet, only aspire to.

So where does this leave the freelance graphic designer?

The old mantra “If you build a website they will come” on the web is finished. And not even the new mantra of “content is king” explains it as you can have excellent content but no one will visit to sample its excellence.

Content is extremely important but it has to share its throne with marketing.

Whether designing for print or web knowing your market and how to reach it is more important now than ever.

The internet is the new kid on the block but ignore print at your peril. Investing in quality print design could give you the edge on your competitors in these challenging times.

So what do you think? Do you find yourself like me besieged by clients who are obsessed with Google, internet marketing and never consider the power of the printed word? Or do you work in print happily unaware of the parallel internet universe?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I have been asked to help publish a magazine by a hospital radio station.

Anyone who has had any sort of stay in a hospital will tell you that hospital radio with it’s music, news and entertainment is a welcome diversion at a difficult time.

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital

One of the bigger hospitals in London with 665 beds and 2,200 staff is the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. When you walk in the main entrance from Fulham Road it appears more like a mall than a hospital.

Designed, in fact, by architects Sheppard Robson who are better known for their shopping centers, it also has a large number of art installations (including large suspended fish, above) and live music can often be heard in it’s atrium. It neither looks, smells nor feels like a hospital.

This is the hospital radio that I shall be doing the magazine for. Radio Chelsea and Westminster does not get any money from the government. It thrives entirely on volunteers and donations … and money we can get from the magazine.

The volunteers don’t only run the radio station, they can be found on the wards chatting to patients (especially those who don’t have visitors) and asking for requests to be played on the radio that evening. Former patient, Colin Bell, recalls:

I asked for “I can’t give you anything” by the Stylistics and listened to the show that evening with baited breath. They played it and got the dedication right. I could not stop crying, it meant so much to me.

Colin is now a volunteer.

Designing, selling advertising space and publishing a magazine

I am really looking forward to this project. Over the coming months I shall be writing, designing, and editing the magazine.

There are several factors why this magazine is attractive to advertisers and sponsors:

• For a variety of reasons it pays to spend more on advertising and marketing in a recession.
• This magazine’s 5,000 copies are distributed throughout the hospital and are left there for a considerable time – the readership maybe as high as 150,000 – whereas other magazines have a shelf-life of a month or less.
• The Chelsea and Westminster Hospital sits right in the middle of one of the most affluent areas of London.

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital facts:
Every year there are 60,000 people admitted for treatment, 5,000 babies are born and more than 80,000 attend the Accident & Emergency department.

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital serves the local population living in Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster (that includes people like the Royal Family, the Prime Minister and Roman Abramovich!) Joking aside, if your business ever takes you to the West End of London, you may one day (God forbid) be grateful for the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.

If you, or anyone you know, wishes to contribute to the magazine in any way please contact me.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I would do catastrophically badly.

I am particularly bad at public speaking. But, even if I weren’t what would it matter if I said: “I am an excellent graphic designer and I have great marketing ideas when it comes to promoting businesses.”

Why would anyone believe me? This is why I am a great believer in the website being your permanent shop window.

It is much better (for me at least) to get your potential clients knocking at your door rather that the other way around. That is why I always eulogize about the benefits of writing constantly about what you do in order to advertise your services to the world.

How to create this in Photoshop

Re-sizing and putting perspective into type is easy in Photoshop. Here’s how I put the text onto the lectern picture.

First of all, create the text you want with the Type tool (T). When you are doing this it is important to make it as large as possible. The reason for this is that it need to be rasterized in order to apply perspective.

The next step (you guessed it) is to rasterize the type layer. Go Layer > Rasterize > Type or right-click (PC) or Cntl-click (Mac) on the type layer and select Rasterize Type.

Now go Edit > Free Transform, or Cntl/Cmd-T and you will see a box around the text with eight anchor points on it. In order to apply perspective Cntl/Cmd-alt-shift-click on one of the four corner anchors and drag. But what you will find easier is just a Cntl/Cmd-click on one of the four corners of the Free Transform box to move that corner to wherever you want. Finally hit return to render the transform.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

There are two sides of a coin when considering how to market your site on the internet. Firstly, concentrate on the site itself: write regularly updated quality content and optimize the site for search engines. Secondly, by concentrating off the site: getting quality sites to link to yours.

Introduction

As I’ve said before in this series, there is no way to cheat the system. Employ these link building methods in an honest and respectful way. There is no quick and easy solution to link building and SEO. It takes time to do and time to see the results.

Why get links? Simply, more links = more traffic.

But also, Google (and other search engines) counts a link as a “vote” for your site. The more votes for your site, the higher your site will feature in their search results. But it is important what sort of page is linking to your site.

Here is what Google says about links:

Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our view of a page’s importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Download the Google toolbar for Firefox and it will show you the PageRank of every page in the internet. If you get links to your site from pages that have a PR of 7 or more you’re laughing!

But the relevance of the inbound link is also important. Get links from sites that are in a similar area of business to yours.

Here’s a great little trick of doing this. Find a site of a company or individual who does what you do but is more established, has a higher PageRank – basically find a website that you want to emulate. Check out the links to their site. Google “links:www.their-site.com” and you will see who links to them. Try to get these sites to link to you!

Here are some tried and tested ways of getting good relevant inbound links to your site. (Apart from having quality content!!!)

Write articles for other sites

I would advise writing original material for other websites, blogs, articles site and industry news sites that are relevant to your field. Duplicated content that already exists on your site might be counted against you by Google. Of course, sometimes you will write an article for someone else and then think to yourself “oh that’s quite good, I should use that on my own site!”

Here are some general articles sites but you should also look for articles sites and blogs that deal with your area of expertise.

• EzineArticles
• GoArticles
• iSnare

Write a press release about developments in your business or site. Take the time to make it a compelling and newsworthy release. Submit it to PRWeb or PRLeap.

Your article or press release will sit on these sites for months and years to come with a link back to your site.

Comment on other blogs

If you read a good article on a blog, why not spend a few minutes writing to say what you liked about the post and see if you can add anything to the discussion? People may follow the link from the comment to your site.

These comment links back to your site may not provide you with any link juice.

The thorny nofollow/dofollow issue and an explanation of “Link Juice”

Link Juice is the name given to the PageRank (and other things) passed from one page to another via a link. Because a lot of blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites and even some directories are “nofollow” you will not get any link juice from links from these sites.

What is a “nofollow” link? rel="nofollow" is a piece of HTML that is used to instruct search engines that the link should not influence the target’s ranking. In other words, a nofollow link sends traffic but not PageRank.

Some webmasters and blog owners actually want to reward commenters with a bit of link juice and remove the rel=”nofollow” tag. So if you comment on these blogs your PageRank and, ultimately, your place in the search engine rankings will improve. Lists of “dofollow” or “nonofollow” blogs do exist but I would exercise caution here.

Commenting on these blogs with a few words such as “nice post, dude” and entering your keywords instead of your name will not help you. Comments such as these will be deleted immediately (they may not even make it on to the page) and will serve only to make you unpopular with the very people you need to get on with. As always with SEO, act honestly.

I used to be a “dofollow” blog but I stopped because of too much comment spam.

Social bookmarking sites

People submit links of content they like on the web to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Technorati (more of a blog search engine) and, new-ish kid on the block, Twitter.

You can create a page of your own favorite links and include a few back to your site. If your links are considered a good resource by others they will follow them, including the ones to your site, and you may get more links from them.

Social bookmarking is a great way to promote your site, network with other people in your area of expertise and find new ideas and information to help you develop your site. But don’t over-submit your own content or you will be penalized. As always with SEO adopt the “white hat” approach. If you’re offering something valuable you will reap rewards. If you don’t, you won’t!

Link to other sites

Link to sites as you would like sites to link to you.

If you find some valuable information or resource related to your field then link to it from your site. But do this in the correct way. Write good anchor text for the link. The anchor text or link label is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the anchor text is weighted highly by search engines. So when you are linking to some other page say what it is (and maybe something nice!).

So do this:

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikipedia</a>

or this:

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikipedia, is amazing multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia </a>

but not this:

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Click here</a> for Wikipedia

The webmaster or blog owner will see this lovely inbound link with good anchor text and may return the favor one day.

Also certain blogs will automatically publish a trackback to your site when you link to it. These trackbacks can produce traffic and, in a minority of cases, link juice – but, again, don’t abuse!

Submit to directories

It’s tedious and depressing and should only be done for 10-15 minutes at a time with some musical accompaniment but here’s a list of 50 free directories with good Google PageRank with no reciprocal link needed.

Reciprocal links and three way link exchanges

Reciprocal links are the “I’ll scratch your back” method of SEO. You link to them if they link to you. The benefit of doing this is considered to be extremely limited.

What may be slightly better is a three way link exchange where site A links to site B and site C links to site A. This creates the illusion of a one way link in the eyes of the search engines. When partaking in this form of linking I would be cautious of link building companies. Regularly check to see if their link to you stays there as many will delete these links a few weeks after they are set up. And try keep them relevant to your site’s subject matter.

Conclusion

Question: So, what’s the best method of ensuring good in-bound links from sites of high Google PageRank?

Answer: content. If you haven’t got anything anybody wants, not many people will link to you. But you knew that, didn’t you.

Another interesting point is that the two reasons for linking – traffic and link juice – usually go hand in hand: my best links in terms of PageRank are actually the best links in terms of traffic.

Go about the above techniques with respect for other sites and for the subject matter – keep it real and honest. And, in my opinion, limit these link building activities to less than an hour a week. You’ll go mad otherwise and it’ll make sure you’re not diverted from the main goal – quality content!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

This is the fifth in the series where I explain how an individual or small or medium sized organization can get themselves noticed in the big bad world.

Other installments explained how to set up a web site from scratch, how to install WordPress and what to write on your site.

Before we commence a couple of definitions – SEO or Search Engine Optimization: is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via organic search results. Keywords: (1) descriptors that capture the essence of a topic or (2) the words you type into a search engine in order to find stuff.

WordPress is pretty well structured for SEO anyway but there are a number of things you can do to improve it’s performance thus winning you more visitors, collaborators and clients.

Get the right URLs

By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them (for example: http://www.your-site.com/?p=N). It’s not good and it’s not pretty. In the WordPress admin panel go Settings > Permalinks. What format is the best to choose? I would go for /%postname%/. This is best because the URLs to articles should never change and it gets keyword rich page titles in there separated by hyphens (for example: http://www.your-site.com/keyword-rich-post/). But, remember, don’t stuff any area with your keywords. Just use them naturally.

Title tags

The most important part of a web page in terms of SEO is the title. Optimize what goes in between and on the top of your browser window. So the name of your WordPress blog to include the keywords that you want people to find you with when they enter them into a search engine. Do this in Settings > General > Blog Title in WordPress’s administration panel. My title is Freelance Graphic Designer London. That’s sort of what I am and I want to attract people who type those words into a search engine to me.

Search engines put more weight on the early words so it is better to have your page title (and then category) to come before your site title. There are many ways of doing this. I would recommend that you use the HeadSpace plugin to do this. Mac users beware that HeadSpace does not work correctly with Firefox, so try Safari.

Categories

WordPress offers excellent categorization of your content. Make sure the category titles are keyword-rich. Write enticing descriptions of your categories in Posts > Categories. Use HeadSpace to add that description to the meta description, by adding %%category_description%% in the Description field.

Heading tags

Generally keywords are better off appearing within <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags than within <p> tags. The <h2> tags are the title of your post or page so put keywords in there. Within your posts and pages you can add subheadings (<h3> tags) which can also contain keywords.

Images

When including an image in the content of your website be sure to name it correctly. So make it “computer-screen.jpg” rather than “image01.jpg”. Also always put an <alt> tag description of about four words explaining what the image looks like. By all means put keywords in there if they are relevant but (as always with keywords) don’t force it. I get about as much traffic from Google image search as I do from ordinary organic Google search just from doing this.

Sitemap and robots.txt

Creating an XML sitemap is often considered a boost to your SEO. It is a widely adopted search engine standard that helps search engine robots crawl your site. It was created by Google and adopted by Yahoo!, Microsoft and others in the search engine industry. You can do this very easily with the Google sitemap generator plugin for WordPress.

So you’ve created an XML sitemap so now what do you do? If you haven’t already, log on to Google Webmaster Tools add your site and submit your sitemap.

You need to add a reference to it in your robots.txt so robots other than Googlebot will know of its presence.

Search engines will look in your root domain for a special file named “robots.txt” (http://www.mydomain.com/robots.txt). The file tells the robot (spider) which files it may spider and where your sitemap is. Here is mine:

User-agent: * Sitemap: http://robcubbon.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /wp-


I have disallowed the robots from directories that have either no relevant content or duplicate content.

Embolden words

Words within <strong> tags carry more weight in SEO terms (as well as visually) than words within <p> tags.

Meta tags

The meta tags provide structured metadata about a web page and exist in the <head> section. They are generally considered to be obsolete but the description tag does appear on the SERPS and therefore should be generated separately for each page. Keyword tags maybe totally ignored but HeadSpace makes creating them very easy so you may as well.

Write your .htaccess

You can choose whether your site should be a www or non-www site. Your site with and without a www could appear to be two sites with the exact same content. Search engines don’t like seeing content copied. You can divert your www url to your non-www url or vice versa by entering a small bit of code into the .htaccess document on the root of your server.

Follow standards

Make sure HTML and CSS code is standards compliant.

Further reading

Here are a couple of pages I have found to be very useful for SEO and WordPress:

• SEO for WordPress – The Complete Guide by Jim Westergren
• WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk

These are only a few things I can think of in order to make a WordPress site optimized for search engines. If anyone knows anymore white hat techniques for SEO – let me know.

Apologies to my English brethren, forefathers and Shakespeare, I’m using American spellings from now on. Most of my visitors are American and with the pound down so low I’d be especially pleased to attract American clients! (As I am pleased to attract a client from anywhere!)

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

So you’ve got your WordPress blog set up and you are just starting to write – what you do?

Words are, in my opinion, the most important thing on a website. This is because the search engine robots that crawl the web every day can pretty much “read” what you’ve written, but they can’t look at your website and think “mmm, nice graphics!”

For me, there’s two things to think about when writing. One is keywords; the other is making sure you’re writing stuff that people are going to want to read.

Keywords in your content

Keywords are what people type into a search engine (Google, for example) in order to find websites. Now there are good and bad ways to introduce keywords into your website text for SEO purposes, but I’ll come to that in my next post. For the time being, if you are a designer for example, you should write about – guess what? – design.

But it’s not as simple as that. It’s virtually impossible to be found on the internet with just one keyword so you should think of your second most important keyword; for me it’s probably “graphic”. Your third most important keyword; for me, “freelance”. The fourth; “London”. And so on. Don’t sweat about choosing these you can always change them.

Use these keywords in the title and body of your articles with the most important being the most frequent. But, there is only one way to do this – naturally.

Write about the subject as you would normally, don’t struggle to add the keywords as many times as possible or even once more than is necessary. For one thing, search engines will penalise you for keyword repetition; for another, it will make your site very unpleasant reading for your visitors.

How would you rather read about a subject you’re interested in – in an ad or an article? It’s so much better to read the considered thoughts of an expert in a field rather than the hurried ramblings of someone who just wants to make money.

Here’s how you make money:

Write content that people will want to read

Write intelligently and lucidly about what you know most about.

Remember, you are an expert, we all are. You’ve spent your life doing something – it doesn’t matter what it is – that something is useful to somebody. This to me is the crux of what internet marketing is all about.

When you write about your specialities you will naturally attract to your website those who are your best customers. Let me explain, I do graphic design and marketing, now graphic design and marketing are huge fields, it would be nuts for me to market myself in this area and leave it at that. So I specialise – every organisation does. Web information about a niche area will draw in like-minded people and perfect clients through Long Tail keywords.

So I’ve written tutorials for Photoshop and Illustrator, blog posts about delivering advertising messages with graphics, articles about web and print production. Other articles have been solely responsible for melanding certain jobs. The subjects of these have been: interactive and rich media PDFs; pop art; creating countries’ map outlines and flags; WordPress for website creation. Quite a mixed bag. But if someone wants to ask me to do something I’m always grateful for the work!

When you are writing about what you know best, keep checking your facts. Constantly ask yourself when you write something if you really are sure about it. Very often in our professional careers it’s easy to believe certain things by hearsay or rumour. Use the internet and any other resource to back up your assertions thoroughly before you publish your post.

So when writing about your specialities, do you spill the beans and reveal all your trade secrets or do you hold back on certain information hoping to retain the power of knowledge from your competitors? I would always favour the former rather than the latter.

I would encourage anyone to put as much detail into their descriptive articles as possible. I’m sure it won’t harm your business to reveal the correct and best practices that you use. Transparency in governments is considered to be ethical so I would encourage anyone to be open as possible in their own organisation.

Your potential clients won’t have the time or the inclination to use this information to do the job themselves and this priceless insight will win you kudos for your generosity. (And, of course, valuable information on the internet will be linked to raising the profile of your site and have it appear higher in search engines’ results, more to come on SEO in the next post.)

I have benefited immeasurably for the community of designers and marketers who have explained techniques and solved problems in websites, blogs and forums. It’s only fair that I give back to the community.

For me this is kind of business karma. Take Matt Mullenweg, for example, the founding developer of WordPress – the most popular and best blogging software that has empowered millions of ordinary people to publish in a beautiful way for free. Matt is listed in Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web, is in Inc.com’s 30 under 30 – America’s Coolest Young Entrepreneurs and his company Automattic Inc is 123rd in TechCrunch.com’s list of Startups Best Positioned To Weather A Downturn. My point is that Matt’s initial and ongoing commitment to open source software – giving out good stuff for free – has helped him in his brilliant career.

So I would advise virtually anyone to get a WordPress site and start writing on the cutting edge of what they know best. The advantages you will see in your community, your networking and your client list will far outweigh the effort.

And in the area of the style of writing, here are ten tips for writing a blog post.

Some say write for a month when starting and then publish for the first time. Some say write every week once you’ve got going. Some say make every post no longer than 350 words.

I say … write!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

In the previous post in my How to market yourself series, I described how to set up a website on a host’s server. Here I will tell you how to set up a WordPress blog on that server. Read my introduction to this self-marketing series here.

OK, so this information exists elsewhere on the internet, so why am I writing this post? Because WordPress is the best way I know to market yourself on the internet so this post is hugely important for this reason.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a robust and feature-full web publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. WordPress, as it says on it’s homepage, is both free and priceless at the same time.

This is about a WordPress.org blog. What’s the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com? WordPress.org is where you can download WordPress to use on your own hosting service and have your own specific website address (this is what I’m recommending). WordPress.com hosts WordPress blogs and therefore puts WordPress.com in your website address and gives you generally less control over your website, for example, the number and kind of adverts and affiliate links are restricted.

WordPress is the best Content Management System for simple “shop window on the world” websites for small and medium sized companies, in my opinion.

What’s good about WordPress?

It’s free. It’s easy to use. There is excellent support documentation and forums because, literally, millions use it. It’s database driven so you can transport it to another CMS if you really want to. Anyone can edit the site (with a username and password) from anywhere in the world. There are many different themes designed that you can dress it up in.

You can add loads of functionality to your website very easily, for example, search, sitemap, RSS feeds, comment forms, contact forms, galleries, etc. Believe me, I could go on.

Still not convinced? Have a look at these websites that use it: StyleWatch at People.com, Martha Stewart, PlayStation’s US blog, Stephen Fry and NY Times blogs.

So here’s the nitty-gritty.

How to install WordPress on your host server

Of course, there is great information on how to install WordPress on the WordPress site. But here’s what you do.

First download and un-zip the current version of WordPress.

Then, create a database and a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it. For those with cPanel go to MySQL Databases and do this. Write down the database name and the MySQL username and password. Finally add the user to the database.

Go to your version of WordPress you had just downloaded and in the folder named “wordpress” look for a file named “wp-config-sample.php”. Open it in your favourite text editor (eg. TextEdit for Mac; NotePad for PC), making sure you are editing in plain text, and look for these three lines at the top.

define(’DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘username’); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password’); // …and password

Fill in the words you chose for your database name, username and password where it says 'wordpress', 'username' and 'password' in lowercase, keeping the inverted commas. Look back at your MySQL Databases page and make sure you have the database name and username exactly as it is there (there maybe prefixes added). Once you are happy with this Save As… “wp-config.php” back in the WordPress directory on your computer.

Now you have to decide whether you want WordPress to power your entire site or just a blog within the site. If you want your whole site to be a WordPress site then upload the contents of the “wordpress” folder but not the folder on the root directory of your host server. The root directory is sometimes called “public_html” or “html_docs”. If, however, you already have a site but just want to add WordPress as a blog then upload the whole “wordpress” folder to the root directory. You may want to re-name the directory “blog” so that the URL of the blog is forward slash blog after your website address.

Lastly, once the uploading is complete, simply go to http://www.mydomain.com/wp-admin/install.php if your whole website is WordPress, or http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory/wp-admin/install.php if you put WordPress inside a sub-directory. (Replace “mydomain.com” with your own domain name and “subdirectory” with the name of the sub-directory you created, “blog” in our example).

Once at this page follow the prompts. You will be ask for your email address and website title, you can change these later. You will also be asked if you want to appear in search engines. I would check that option unless you want to view your website in isolation!

You will soon be emailed a password to access administration panels – keep a copy of this safe.

And now the fun really begins!

That was the famous 5 minute installation which took me at least half an hour the first time I did it and even now takes at least 10 minutes! Setting up WordPress on your host server is a task that prepares you for the process of owning and maintaining and constantly updated professional-looking website!

Picture credit: Francis Chouquet WordPress Designer

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

This is the second post in my How to market yourself series, a personal account of the best marketing techniques you can employ for yourself or your business. Read my introduction to this self-marketing series here.

There are three things you need to do when setting up your website.

1. Decide on your website address (URL)
2. Register it
3. Find a web host

How to decide on your web address

Many people spend hours thinking up a catchy URL (Uniform Resource Locator) or website address. The most important SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) point is to include some keywords (separated by hyphens). Your URL doesn’t have to be your name or your company name so why not increase your chances of being found in searches before you’ve even written a web page? So, if you are a web designer, why not try web-designer dot com? (OK, it’s already gone, but you know what I mean).

You can test out domain names at any domain name registrar. Which brings me on to the next thing you have to do.

Register your website’s address

Once you have decided on the name of your website it is necessary to register it. I use GoDaddy. There doesn’t seem to be a much cheaper option and GoDaddy are the market leaders. You can also try 123-Reg, particularly if you’re based in the UK and want a .co.uk domain.

One thing I would suggest is not to use your domain name registrar as your host. I like to keep the two operations separate because if you have a problem with one it is easier to move.

Cost: You’re looking at around $10 a year. When you register a domain name, your contact details are included in a publicly available database known as the Whois database which can lead to spamming. You can spend slightly more to hide these details.

An important SEO point: Search engines prefer if the domain is registered for a longer time into the future so that you don’t look like a fly-by-night website. For this reason, it’s better to register for five years rather than the minimum one year.

How to choose a web host?

The web hosting industry is highly competitive with seemingly hundreds of companies offering similar packages. Here are some of the things you need to take into account.

A great way to market yourself and get search engines to include you in their search results is to blog. The blogging software I’ll be recommending in this series of articles is WordPress.

The minimum specifications for the hosting of a WordPress blog are PHP 4.3 or greater, MySQL 4.0 or greater and the mod_rewrite Apache module. PHP is scripting language; MySQL is a database server. These are fairly standard specifications and will be offered by most quality web hosts but make sure you check! WordPress recommends a few hosts here.

Other than that here are some more important points to look out for:

1. Disk space. Once you have a host you will find it useful for a number of things not just your website. It is another bit of computer space to use. You can use it as your own personal FTP site for storing information. If you think you need this facility go for a web host that’s offering tons of disk space.
2. Monthly transfer / Bandwidth. This refers to how much your website is accessed. For example, if your website consists of one page of 1MB (very unlikely) and is visited by ten people a month, you would need more than 10MB of monthly transfer to facilitate this. Of course most website pages are less than 100K so, unless you are expecting huge amounts of visitors, 10GB/month will be enough at first and your web host will be able to offer you more as your website increases in popularity. Keep your eye on it though. How?
3. A control panel. cPanel is the most advanced web hosting control panel in the industry, designed to simplify administration of a website and I would recommend choosing a host that offers it. Through the cPanel you can set up and read email, manage and edit your website’s files, monitor your website’s traffic (making sure you don’t exceed any bandwidth or space restrictions), and loads of other things including backing up a MySQL database which is essential for good WordPress maintenance. cPanel sometimes comes bundled with Fantastico which is a set of scripts which automate the installation of, but not always the update of, CMSs such as SMF, phpBB, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress and over 50 others, although I would not install WordPress this way.
4. The validity of your web host. I would only choose a web host that had a professional looking website. Also, I would definitely insist on 24/7 email support, personally I wouldn’t mind if it didn’t have phone support.

Cost: You’re looking at around 8$/month for a decent shared hosting package. Shared hosting is fine if you are only going to have one website and you’re just starting out.

An important SEO point: The most important point for search engine marketing is the location of your website. If, for example, you are interested in the UK market you should use a UK based web host. However, if for example, you are a UK company wanting to market your services internationally, then I would choose a US host.

Recommended web hosts for WordPress users

I’ve researched this by asking WordPress professionals in forums and LinkedIn groups about the most reliable shared hosting and the following three companies came up with the most votes:

• Justhost
• Bluehost
• Hostgator

So, I’ve got a web address and a host, now what do I do?

Your new host should give you 4 useful pieces of information so that you can set up a website.

1. IP address. An IP address is a unique number that every computer connected to the internet is assigned. It consists of 4 numbers separated by dots. This is the IP address of your server’s computer, not your personal computer.
2. Your username.
3. A password. These first 3 are necessary for uploading files to the server.
4. Domain Name Servers/System/Service (DNS). A very important link between your domain name and IP address.

If, as I suggest, you register your domain name with a company other than your host you will need to return to your domain name registrar’s website and and fill in the name servers (usually one primary and one secondary) you got from your host.

That done, wait 24 hours (usually much less) and you can create your new website.

Next, use your favourite FTP client (eg. Cyberduck for Mac; Filezilla for PC) and, with the IP address, username and password, you can log on to your host. You may find quite a few directories. Look for one called “public_html” or similar. This is where your website should go.

Use your favourite text editor (eg. TextEdit for Mac; Notepad for PC) and make a new plain text document, write a message in it and save it as “index.html”. Upload the “index.html” file. Now if you type in your domain name in a browser it will display your message.

Congratulations, you have just created a website!

As always, I welcome comments, especially to notify me of anything I’ve missed!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I have successfully been on the first page in Google for freelance graphic designer for a few months now and I’m quite pleased with this.

Marketing yourself is one of the most important things any professional or company will do. For this reason I’m going to write a number of articles about self-marketing, what I mean by it and how I do it.

I’m not going to go on about crafting a mission statement, identifying expertise and clients and creating a robust consistent identity. I’m sure everyone spends a lot of time on that and it’s specific to each organisation. What I wish to tell you about the details of how I think you can run a successful website and company in these challenging times.

Search Engine Optimisation

The first thing to remember with SEO is that you can’t cheat the system. What I mean is that there is no easy course of action that will make your website first on Google after having entered certain keywords.

However, if you have content specific to those keywords and it is proven to be, so other websites link to you in a certain way, then quality targetted traffic will come your way from the search engines.

A WordPress blog is well designed and structured already for search engine optimisation and this is my preferred method of creating and updating content for visitors, clients and search engines alike.

But SEO doesn’t start and finish with a blog. There are many things you can do before, during and after creating your blog that will mean success or failure with the search engines.

General Marketing

Once that is all explained I will go on to other things you can do to promote yourself and your organisation. By general marketing I mean promotion. I’ll leave the price, place, product, process and physical evidence to you!

I will explain how to design and produce HTML emails, flyers, business stationery, etc.

How do I get on the first page of Google’s search results?

I’d guess that there’s probably a million pages on the internet dedicated to answering this question. Come to think of it, there’s probably more than a million people in the world working in this area (SEO). I’m prepared to admit I’m prone to exaggeration but if someone would like to put me right on this then I’ll stand corrected!

It’s the 64 million dollar question but it has a simple answer although it’s a solution that involves hard work and eats up time.

Here is my answer: create a website with lots of constantly updated, quality, relevant content with lots of inbound links from other quality, relevant websites.

Now, this needs further explanation (for example, you my well ask: how many is “lots”?) and people may disagree with the “constantly updated” bit, but that is essentially it – as far as I’m concerned.

What now?

So, I will try to post the next installment in this series of How to market yourself soon where I will explain what to do in order to set up your website or WordPress blog.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I’m always on the look out for simple eye-catching ways to communicate a message. I think this is a great example of a visually appealing background that could be used when there are no images, graphics or other ways to improve the typography. This is especially useful in direct marketing (email or mail shot).

How to create it in Illustrator

The first thing you need to do, and it may not be apparent why, is to draw a triangle. How do you draw an equilateral triangle in Illustrator? Easy, simply fetch your Polygon tool from the Toolbar (it may be hiding under the Rectangle or Ellipse tool) and click once on the artboard. Then choose 3 Sides, don’t worry about the Radius. You then need to turn the triangle on it’s side and elongate it so it an isosceles with two long sides and a short base pointing to the left or the right. Don’t worry, it’ll become clear why later!

Now, with the triangle selected, find your Brushes palette and select New Brush… in the drop down menu and choose Art Brush. Notice the direction the brush is pointing in (left), this will be important.

Now draw a curve from the centre of your artboard to the outside, make sure it has a stroke but no fill. Then apply the triangular brush that is now in your brush palette. Now go Object > Expand Appearance. This changes the stroke to a fill which we will need in order to apply a gradient to the curve.

Now the exciting bit (you thought this wasn’t so exciting so far?), option/alt click on the apex of your curve with the Rotate (R) tool selected (see inset left). In the resulting dialog box (left) enter a number that goes into 360 evenly and hit copy. Now, the really exciting bit. Go Cntl/Cmd-D and keep your finger on it. Cool, huh?

Now all you have to do is to apply radial gradients to taste. And serve with some attention grabbing copy lines helped along with some well-crafted typography!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Personally, I have noticed other recessions far sooner than this one. It seems like months and months of dreary economic forecasts had passed before I got an inkling that it was going on. Anyway, here’s some ways to defeat the dreaded downturn.

Diversify

Do something you’re not doing at the moment. Web designers should diversify into web development. Print people should explore the internet. Design firms should move into marketing.

One of the crazy things about the last few years is not how the internet has taken over but how all media has evolved. Take the humble PDF for example; it’s a way of supplying print ready artwork as well as a revolutionary form of digital communication. So printers, don’t worry if you think the internet is daunting you already have tremendous experience in creating one of the great formats of the future!

Advertise

As reported in a previous article about managing recession, two of the world’s biggest advertisers, Unilever and Procter & Gamble, announced recently that they would not cut their marketing budgets.

A recession is a time to increase your advertising budget not reduce it. Advertising space and marketing services may reduce in price as other companies cancel orders so you can steal market share at a good price.

Outsourcing and saving money

Why would you want to give work away? Because you’re too busy to do it. So you accept the work, give it to someone else to do and charge the client more than what you pay them.

Work from home. Email PDFs of invoices, quotes, work samples, etc. Don’t buy printers and use snail mail. Use Gimp instead of Photoshop. Xara Xtreme instead of Illustrator. There’s tons of free fonts, vectors, backgrounds and photos out there. Cut costs not quality.

Consolidate

Keep your existing clients as they are your best source of new business. Drop a line or make a call to a client if you haven’t heard from in a while. A Christmas card to everyone you’ve known in a professional capacity is one of the best exercises in consolidation there is.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Recession, credit crunch, slowdown – these are bywords of the moment and you would be forgiven for thinking that we’ve got to tighten out belts and prepare for hard times ahead.

The natural inclination for some businesses might be to scale back on marketing activities in an effort to save money. But, last week it was reported that two of the world’s biggest advertisers, Unilever and Procter & Gamble, would not cut their marketing budgets.

It’s been proved time after time that a recession (and let’s not forget we’re not actually technically in one yet!) is a time to increase your marketing budget.

Why? Because, in a downturn, the shortsighted companies will reduce their advertising spend allowing businesses that maintain or increase their spend to steal market share from them. Also, advertising space and marketing services may reduce in price so that the same advertising spend buys you more media.

One possible way to cut cost whilst increasing ‘share of voice’ would be to employ freelance graphic designers and marketeers rather than using an agency. Freelancers often outperform agencies in quality, price and timeliness. To put it bluntly, a freelancer could charge you £35/hour for what an agency would charge £150/hour. One client of mine recently commented that agencies seem to charge you for sneezing!

So, far from being a negative experience, the recent “bad” news on the economy may present us with an unparalleled opportunity!

What is your experience on the changes in marketing spend in your business?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Web 2.0 in design and marketing

This is an image I made to try to explain the digital grapevine: A network of users that interact to answer questions, solve problems and have fun or the trend in the use of the internet and web design that enhances creativity, information sharing and collaboration among users that has been referred to as “Web 2.0″. The best description of this that I have read is from Stephen Fry:

… an idea in people’s heads rather than a reality … an idea that the reciprocity between user and provider is what’s emphasised. In other words, genuine interactivity, if you like, simply because people can upload as well as download.

The internet is now a teenager – it’s been 14 years since Marc Andreessen’s release of the Netscape Navigator browser in 1994. Now the technology has evolved to web-based communities such as social-networking sites, wikis and blogs.

I intend to harness the benefit of this trend both for myself and my clients as I see it as an important approach to both design and marketing at the moment.

How I made the image

I was very suprised I couldn’t find a sample series of binary numbers on the net quickly, so here are mine.


001001010111010101101001010011010100110010001100100001
011010011000010001100100010101001100110000100101011101
101011011001100001100100010110010010011001101101001100
010100100000110110101101101101110111001000110100101001
011011101011101110101000100101100000011000110111011101
110100000100010000011101011011110100101010100101011110
110110101010010001100100011001000110001111011011101001
0001000100000110101101010111010111100

These numbers were put in the OCR-A font. This font is used for a variety of purposes including the ISBN labels on books. After scrolling through Blend Modes in the Layers palette in Photoshop, I hit upon Soft Light and Overlay as ones that seemed to work.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

There is an ad campaign in London at the moment for Portuguese tourism. You can see 48-,24- and 16-sheet adverts in the tube with giant portraits of famous Portuguese celebrities (Cristiano Ronaldo, José Mourinho) with a landscape showing through the image. Something similar to this effect that can be achieved with only a few clicks in Photoshop.

It helps to find a picture, like the one below of José Mourinho, that is lit from the side so half the face is white and the other half black. However, failing that, find a portrait that has a white background. Once the image is chosen, cmd/ctrl-click on either the red, blue or green channel in the Channels palette. This will give you a selection.

Now find your “background” image and paste it over your portrait image. Now click on the New Layer icon in the Layers palette to give you a blank new layer. With the selection still live, fill this layer with white. To do this either go Edit > Fill… and in the resulting pop-up box chose White for your fill (the quick key for this pop-up box is shift-F5) or simply go cmd/ctrl-delete to fill the selection with the background colour (the default background colour is white; to get the default foreground and background colours, simply press D). You knew that!

You may want to copy this white layer (cmd/ctrl-J) or alter it’s opacity.

This is a simple and effective way of putting one image inside another with interesting and eye-catching results.

You can download the PSD of the top picture here. 3.4MB

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

I’ve noticed a trend emerge recently. A client of mine got me to design an invitation to a marketing event – cocktails at a new store – I sent him a beautifully designed invite in the form or a PDF and asked him how many he needed printed and he said: “Oh, there’s no need, I’m sending the PDF by email”.

More and more of this will be happening in the future. If this widely-predicted recession actually takes hold, marketing managers can tighten there budgets by sacrificing digital print for digital communication.

It’s another benefit of the interactive PDF. Why go to the expense of printing something when you can email a PDF? They look good, the file size is low enough not to bother the receiver and, let’s face it, it’s more likely to be seen than if it was sent in the post.

There are various other ways of side-stepping a printer. There’s html emails, although care should be taken that they’re not seen as spam. And there’s one-off web pages – if you’re very worried about spam filters simply put a link in your email. A new domain can be set up in seconds for next to nothing. Simply create a site at www dot something-interesting-that-hasn’t-been-thought-of-yet dot com and design an eye-catching splash page. Use web stats and forms to see if visitors have landed.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Everybody knows that your marketing message will be enhanced by the creative use of graphic imagery. A competent graphic designer will be able to communicate your message to your market.

But have you ever wondered what is the best way to make the graphic communicate the message?

The above picture provides an answer. And it is … make the graphic the message or put the message in the graphic.

I was working with a well-known international credit agency who were pitching to a large bank. They were trying to convey to the bank the message that they would save money if they took them on. So I put the message on a till display or cash register. Some people were skeptical at first, saying that the cash till gave a negative message of spending money and would imply the opposite. But I was adamant about it. The message was powerful enough and the graphic provided context – much better than an image of dollar bills, for example.

The point is that the message fits into the image in an everyday way.

It’s an obvious one but it nearly always works. There is one thing I have loved doing over years and years of Photoshop usage. It’s getting a picture and incorporating an idea, a message, some copy, some type, an icon, a headline or a symbol into it. There’s something about it that instantly captures the attention.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.