Effective Website Branding Tips

So, what is it that would differentiate your website from the others? It takes only a few minutes (in most cases, a few seconds) for a visitor to pass by your site before he gets what he wants on the internet.

In a world, where billions of websites are available, yours is just one of them. Branding is the key here to hit the dart. In other words, to be noticed amongst the many is an art in itself.

Last month, I wrote an article on “Why branding is an essential aspect of marketing” and now, these few tips would help you make a start to be that one in a million websites:

Emphasize on what you do and not on who you are – Your website content should clearly project the commodity that you offer and not what you are all about. Use appropriate and minimal words to define your products/services. However, this does not mean that you should not give out information regarding your company. Ensure that you have a separate page depicting the corporate identity and stating what your organization stands for.

Attractive Website – A visually attractive website can count on more visitors than that of a less appealing one. Make appropriate use of colors that is in – sync with your theme. This could be done with the help of pictorial descriptions that make it easier for the visitor to understand. However, make sure that you balance all the aspects appropriately to give the perfect output.

Logo – A logo would give a picture to your entity. It would define your commodity giving a glimpse into what you stand for. Devising an effective tagline along with your logo is an added advantage.

Blogs & Videos – An internal blog giving updates about your organization as well as the industry would be an asset. There are definitely a certain set of people who constantly look for the latest. Keeping your website updated with all the latest blog posts would definitely act as advantage. This way, your website would be renowned as a leader in its domain.

Additionally, make your presence felt in the external domains as well. These include contributing blogs, articles and press releases in other websites meant for this specific purpose. Also, share these posts within your network in the industry. Your frequency in constantly sharing information would determine your popularity. So, “the more the better”!

Incorporating videos wherever necessary would also do the trick! Time constraints might lead the visitor skip your page but now you can stop him with that video which would hardly take a few minutes to get an overview of the entire commodity or the concept.

Research – Any new initiative on your site should always be accompanied by thorough research in your field. You definitely would not want to attempt something that has been tried and tested a several times. Conduct online and offline surveys amongst your target audience to know what they are looking for. Although it is time consuming but the results would set you apart from competitors. Also, you can take expert opinion in this regard, if the need arises.

Daily Blog Tips is on a New Server

Last week I opened a discussion on the blog titled “What is Your Favorite Web Hosting?“. That is quite a coincidence because when I wrote that I was not planning to move the blog anywhere, I just wanted to give my feedback from previous hosting experiences, and thought that it would be useful for the readers if they could also share theirs and read recommendations from other people.

I tried to talk with the customer support to see if we could solve the problem somehow, but there was nothing they could do about it. Most companies guarantee 99,5% of uptime, and that translates to 3 hours and 36 minutes of allowed downtime every month. Frankly that is not good enough for me.

I had not decided to move yet, but on Friday the blog went down for over an hour, and on Saturday it went down several times during the day, summing almost 2 hours of downtime (I track that with Pingdom.com). That made it for me. The situation was so bad that the support tried to offer me one free month of hosting.

Anyway yesterday I made the switch, and DBT is now hosted on a Doreo server. My other blogs are already hosted there, and they had 20 minutes of downtime over the past 8 months, so hopefully it will continue like this.

1. Set the TTL to a low value before making the transfer.

TTL stands for time to live, and it regulates how many transmissions a piece of computer data can go before being discarded. Your DNS records (the information connecting your domain to your hosting server) have a TTL, which is usually set a one day. That means that if you update your nameservers today (making them point to the new hosting company) it might take up to 24 hours before people actually start seeing your site on the new server. This may cause all sorts of problems, from the lost of comments and emails to some visitors not being able to access the site at all.

2. Prefer hostings that offer cPanel

In the past I had already transfered this blog between two different servers. One of them was not using cPanel, though, so I was forced to copy and restore all the site files and MySQL databases manually. It worked well, but somehow when I was restoring the databases it messed up some special characters on my blog posts, and I needed to fix them one by one, on over 200 posts…

How to put text inside search forms

Most blog templates come with search forms that have no text inside the input area. While this standard solution is fine, you might want to personalize your search form by adding a default text to it.

The text can help readers to identify the search area more easily, encourage them to use the search function or even clarify the searching process for non-experienced users. Here are some examples of texts that you can include on your box:

• Search
• Search here
• Search this blog
• To search, type and hit enter

Now lets clarify how to place the text inside the search form. The first thing you need to locate is the the search form code. Wordpress users should be able to find it within the header.php or sidebar.php files, depending on where your search box is located. Once you find the code look for the a line similar to this one:

Now you will need to add three new arguments inside that line:

• value=”Text to be displayed here”
• onfocus=”if(this.value==this.defaultValue)this.value=”;”
• onblur=”if(this.value==”)this.value=this.defaultValue;”

The last two arguments make sure that the text you inserted will disappear once the user clicks on the input area.

How to create a favicon

A favicon (short for “favorite icon”) is that small icon displayed on the browser URL bar, on the bookmark lists and, for certain browsers, on the navigation tabs. While a favicon will not drastically change your traffic it will certainly improve the look of your blog, adding a unique icon and making sure that readers are able to individuate your site inside bookmark lists easily.

1) General Guidelines

A favicon is nothing more than a 16 pixels by 16 pixels icon, and the file has a .ico extension. As you can imagine it is pretty difficult to put complex graphics in such a small frame. When designing your favicon, therefore, you should concentrate on simple images or letters. Make sure that the color of the favicon reflects the color of your website, so that readers will be able to associate the icon with the site.

2) Using Photoshop (skip this point if you are not using Photoshop)

Adobe Photoshop is probably the best alternative for a well-designed favicon. The standard Photoshop can not handle .ico, so the first thing to do is to download a Windows Icon Photoshop Plugin (you can download it here).

Once you have the Plugin installed you should create a 64 x 64 pixels canvas and start playing with it. After you are done designing the favicon you will need to resize the image. Go to the Image Size menu and click Resample Image. This process will make sure that the image will not blur as you scale it down.

How to Deliver the Highest Impact with Each Post

High-Impact Posts

There’s isn’t a formula for writing a high-impact post, but here are some tips from what I’ve learned:

• Extremely useful. Be as useful as possible on a topic that people want to learn about.
• Complete guides. An extension of the above tip, but as complete as you can be — someone should be able to read the guide and do whatever it is you’re teaching.
• Great headlines. The headline should make people think, or curious, or promise to be really useful.
• Controversial. Don’t just say controversial things in order to get noticed, but if you can think beyond the conventional and say something different, or in a different way, you’ll get people thinking and talking.
• Short. Not all high-impact posts are short — in fact many aren’t — but if you have a post with one brilliant idea, written concisely and memorably, it’ll have a great chance of getting spread. See Seth Godin for some great examples.
• Memorable. Don’t ever be run-of-the-mill. Do something different, in a way that people will remember. Be bold!
• Consistent. One memorable post is good, but if you’re consistently useful and memorable, week in and week out, people will come to expect it of you and each post will have greater impact.
• Full of resources. Link to other guides or great blogs or books. Save people hours of time researching a topic by giving them the best resources.
• New ideas. Don’t repeat the same ideas — come up with some of your own.
• Looking at new angles. Even if you don’t cover every aspect of a topic on one post, you can go into a lot of depth if you consistently cover different angles of a topic. The more angles you can look at in different posts, the more completely you’ll cover a topic.
• Fewer posts. While the big blogs like Lifehacker and Gizmodo can put out a dozen posts a day, smaller blogs have to make their posts count. By reducing the number of posts you have, you are less likely to overwhelm the reader — and so the reader will be more likely to read your posts.
  

Start Your Own Blog

Start Your Own Blog Site: Step 1
Starting your own blog is not really rocket science. The first step is to get an internet connection. Ok, that was not as funny as I thought it would be. Though, you do need internet connection, the first step is to get onto a blogging site. There are many options that one can choose from. The most popular and user friendly would be blogspot, blogger and wordpress. These websites are also search engine optimized, which helps your blog rank on search engines like the google search engine and bing. You need to register your self, once you're done with the registration and the settings, you will have your very own domain name.

Start Your Own Blog Site: Step 2
You can even start your own blog for money. Many people have asked me how to start your own blog and make money. It is as simple as it can get. Most popular blogging sites have addable gadgets. One of them is the google adsense. Google adsense is a method to get relevant adds on the page. The blogger has to register himself on the google adsense website (for which you will get directions along the way). You will have to fill the requisite details. The payments are on a per click basis.

Start Your Own Blog Site: Step 3
Now that you have handled all the gadgets, you need to ensure that you select a template. Every blogsite has different templates for the users to select from. One has the option to change the templates as per convenience. There are also a few other websites that provide free or premium blog templates and backgrounds. You can make a selection as per your choice.

Start Your Own Blog Site: Step 4
It is nice to make sure that your blog looks good, after all it is a part of you on virtual display. So, after selecting the template and backgrounds, you need to add content on the blog. You can add content as per your interest. It could be your thoughts, things that you observe around you, reviews, quotes etc. However, ensure that you do not copy content from any site. If done beyond a certain extent, copying content from other websites is considered illegal. Users can be prosecuted and their domains can be deleted for it.

Start Your Own Blog Site: Step 5
If your wondering about how to start your own blog page in order to make money, you need to make sure that you market your blog. There are websites that you can register your blog at in order to increase the traffic to your blog. Another thing you can do to market your blog is to add the url of the blog in your email signature, and at social networking sites. Peruse through other blogs and make relevant comments on their posts. This will make that particular blogger visit your blog as well. These small steps help make your blog far more popular than otherwise.

Tips To Make More Money Blogging

Making more money with your blog can be a real headache. I for one didn't start making any real money with my blog until recently (2 months ago). My blog is over a year old and just started to pick up in rankings and traffic. I can just say this much; it is the hardest thing getting traffic and making sales. Here are some tips on how to increase your income using your blog.

Use Social Bookmarking Carefully- You do not want to wind up like me; I got my website banned from most of the social bookmarking sites. This had a lot to do with me writing multiple blog post and bookmarking them all at the same time. Social bookmarking does not like 'self promotion'. So, you should bookmark no more than 3-4 of your blog post at a time. Once your website is banned, it doesn't matter if you open 30 new accounts, you will never get that organic traffic again from this resource.

Write Evergreen Content- I notice that I get more traffic from the search engines when I write Evergreen Content. What is Evergreen Content? This type of content lasts a long time in the search engines because people are always searching for this information. An example of this type of content would be Wikipedia articles or computer guides.

Write Longer Blog Post- Because of the spam problem with splogs, Google is paying more attention to blogs that provide organic and original content. They are also rewarding websites that have more content in each blog post. Last year, the norm use to be 400 words; now Google is favoring articles with at least 600 words or more.