Dainis Graveris
Role: Owner & Founder of Awesome 1WD
Dainis Graveris is 23 years old blogger and designer, founder of 1stWebDesigner, now more silently managing everything behind the scenes. He usually hangs out in Twitter tweeting design related links and chatting with people. If you have any questions or feedback that's the best place to start! Cheers!
*Special* LIVE Webinar Training: Learn 5 Step Formula How To Get Clients
Get ready for the FIRST live webinar at 1stwebdesigner! Check out video inside!
Are you struggling to get your very first client? Worrying about getting more clients in your freelance career?
I got my very first client when I understood how to look at everything through his eyes! I became a marketer, not only a web designer, and I never had to worry about not having enough work!
Using a super-simple 5-Step System, I am about to show you exactly how to become an expert freelancer and land well paying freelance gigs anytime you want!
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1WD Foundation: In Order To Speed Up, You Need To Slow Down
Do you know that in order to speed up, you need to take things slow? That’s right, before running, it is smart to warm up and prepare – check the map, put on the right running gear, and put a drink in your backpack!
You don’t just start coding a website right off the bat, right? Before you create a website for a client you probably send them a questionnaire, discuss the details and draft a contract outlining what you agreed too, right?
Even if you design a website for yourself, don’t you write down what the end result will look like?
Don’t you sketch or create a wireframe before you start coding?
Well, you can choose to skip the preparation stage in the hopes of getting your project finished sooner, but you will likely waste a lot of time if you don’t have clarity and run into creative blocks!
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
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You Are Alone No More: Introducing 1WD TV
Today we have really exciting news for you!
How would you like to see yourself become a better web designer with our help? Do you feel like you are left alone on this journey to become a web designer?
Do you want to see and hear how I flunked on camera and do you want to see 1WD’s new branded microphone?
Yes, you heard it right – see and hear!
We aren’t seeing you yet, but you can see us and it really feels like we are talking directly to you!
You are alone NO MORE! Oh, wait! There is much more, watch video now!
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1WD Ebook Launch Case Study: How To Get 8000 Downloads in 3 days
Two months ago 1stwebdesigner launched three ebooks, stepping into this market for the first time. We planned our promotion in a way that we had 8,000 free downloads in three days, which resulted in $1,000 profit for the first month through Amazon. The following month we did even better, closing to $2,000 for July. The best thing about this promotion is that I know we’ll be making $1000 per month passively and if we want to make more it will depend on our own promotion. These numbers may not seem impressive compared to a $100,000 launch, but I like that this money is earned passively, it’s a nice side income, regardless of whatever we are doing. Mainly it’s because of the huge Amazon market itself, giving us a regular 500 sales per month.
Would you mind earning $2,000 monthly as side income? Please don’t read further if these numbers don’t sound good enough for you! Search for the next quote about Scamworld, where gurus will teach you how to make millions! Hell yeah – that’s what I am talking about! In this post I will reveal details how we came up with the idea for ebooks, promoted them on Amazon to get rankings and leveraged their market. My aim is to show you how you can do the same thing and possibly perform even better.
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Warning: The Shocking Truth about 1WD Behind the Scenes Unveiled
We have gone through so many changes and now I feel really bad about not letting you know the details sooner! 1WD has been struggling a lot lately and that’s why we are busy reorganizing the site, taking a leap of faith and hoping that after all the changes we’ll come out better than we are now. Now you’ll get a peek behind the scenes of 1WD!
In this post I will explain what has happened behind the scenes for the last three months and what we are working on now. We really believe that by narrowing our focus, working on our own products, and really listening to your feedback, we will make everyone love this design blog!
You know how I like to share what I’ll be covering before I start? Here are the things I’ll be covering throughout this article:
- Survey results where we got more than 1,000 responses
- Slap from Google and the actions we took to recover and improve the reading experience
- Changing host in process
- Completely finishing 1WD redesign, call for feedback!
- 1WD Ebook launch summary
- 1WD Labzip product, learn what it is all about
- FounderTips website for web design marketing advice
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How To Clean Up And Optimize Your Existing WordPress Blog Posts For SEO
So you wrote a lot of great posts over the past few years which still receive a lot of traffic from search engines, but you’re always wondering how long it will last. Or maybe you were affected by the latest Google Panda or Penguin changes and lost some traffic to that old content?
Perhaps you have noticed that you have been affected by these issues, perhaps not.
Whether you are affected or not, one question remains: how do I clean up and optimize my existing blog posts?
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Super Hot News: Get 1WD Three Quick EBooks Now For Free Just For Three Days!
Today, 1WD is happy to announce the launch of our 3 quick eBook series! This series will consist of eBooks covering the latest trends, practices, and technologies in web design and development.
You’re probably thinking to yourself, “How is that different than what everyone else is doing?” Glad you asked! What really separates our eBooks from the competition is that we cover the same amount of material, go into the same amount of depth, but do it in an easy to follow 50 pages on average. That’s right, all the information you’ll need, in a size that you can actually read!
To begin the series we are first releasing three eBooks, covering Responsive Web Design and HTML5 and Web Design Trends. Here is a better description of each.
Update: Ebooks are no longer free, you can buy them on Amazon for 0.99$ each now!
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Revised Google SEO Guide 2012 Edition: Big Changes in Algorithm
Everybody is buzzing all around now, how latest changes Google did affected their search traffic greatly! Chances are if you monitor your own properties on Google Analytics, you will see significant drop in your traffic in March!
1WD was seriously affected as well from March 20! Besides Google Panda release, there were 2 rounds of changes Google did, hurting almost every site search traffic:
• Panda 3.3 - Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February
• Panda 3.4 on March 23 - Search quality highlights: 50 changes for March
So what exactly do these changes mean? Do you need to be worried and what can you do to be prepared and be more likable in Google’s eyes?
In this Google SEO guide I will show you the behind the scenes on how 1WD was affected, explain how to monitor your traffic better and how to be more prepared in the future. A lot of websites were hit hard, even high authority websites. We always have been focusing on high quality content here, never used spammy link building techniques and we believe our social presence is very strong as well.
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Landing Pages Guide 101: Create Landing Pages that Work
I am by no matter an expert in landing page creation, but I am doing a lot of research on this topic in order to become more experienced myself and I invite you to join me in this journey.
In this article you will be taken through each important step in order to create a successful, landing page that converts visitors into customers, I will share the biggest takeaways here and point you to the right articles and tools – let’s call it Landing Pages 101, Science Of Landing Pages, Anatomy of Converting Landing page, whichever you prefer most.
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Traffic Building Tools And Websites: Social Marketing And Link Building For Designers
A lot has changed now and social media is changing rapidly. This article will help you see hidden gold mines you can discover to build a lot of back links, bring huge social media traffic and enjoy the whole process along the way. I participate in social media mainly because I need traffic, but I also enjoy that I am able to communicate with a lot of people, find good articles I would never find otherwise and learn a lot of stuff all the time! And this skill always comes handy whenever you deal with the Internet – everybody needs more traffic, more buyers, more visibility and good brand built online!
In this article you won’t find advanced explanations how to use each of the services, just basic tips, you’ll get a glimpse of everything. I am creating this article for my own one stop place while doing promotion. Work hard on bigger networks and submit your links to small social sharing sites, submit news and in the end you’ll get good back links, good visibility and social traffic! My own 1stWebDesigner success is built through these websites, which allowed me to get 50,000 unique visitors to my site in its first month of existence. Now I have developed my skills and I am giving you tools and sites which work today (however I also added comments on sites, which are popular but are hard to master, be aware of these too).
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