Guest Authors, Poll And Partnership With IconShock

Hello there, my beloved readers! Things are again going to change, so I thought I should create this community post and explain what’s happening behind the scenes. This time I will discuss with you two topics – 1. I am searching for guest writers and 2. I received amazing partnership from Iconshock Projects company! But take your time and read this article through to understand what I mean, I am sure you’ll like these ideas!

About guest writing

Site is slowly continuing to grow, if last month it got ~400k uniques, now there is ~450k, but yeah, again I feel it’s not enough.

I promised you before month, more tutorials and more frequent posts, but yes things don’t happen so fast as I would wish. This month was a little bit more silent because I’ve got to go to my design academy studies, learning how to drive auto..and yes, I started to go to Salsa lessons as well. Right, but what about blog? In terms of increasing traffic and article quality I am searching for guest writers. Good thing is, now I will also split my budget and start to pay guest writers, at first it won’t be a whole lot comparing to other sites, but at least it will be good beginning.

I must say – big thanks to people, who already wrote to e-mail wishing to contribute in order to get experience and promote their own site by getting some backlinks. To be honest I am planning to do the same on several very popular design blogs as WebDesignerDepot, SmashingMagazine and more. Why it is good thing to do? If your blog is new, without many subscribers and unique visitors, you need to get that attention! Popular design blogs have got huge traffic, thousands of subscribers already – there must be a way how to get part of their traffic and subscribers! And you guessed, guest writing is the best thing to do in early basis if you want to get noticed! And did I say, “in content” links are much more powerful from SEO point of view, than for example sidebar partner’s links?

Let’s drop down again, what do you get from contribution:

1. Personal contact with blog’s author. It’s always have been important to know the RIGHT people, who could help you later. It works, you need to give before you receive back, I’ve been working hard to build community in social networks, but it definitely pays of in long run!
2. In content “Author’s link”. When you write an article usually on bottom of it, you can write something about yourself, share some links. If people will like your post, they will be interested to get more and they will visit your site and maybe even become regular readers!
3. Get experience. While you will be working, usually author will give you several advices from his own experience..at least I do. It may seem nothing important at first, but remember their approach works and you can get very good tips just by asking with small effort.
4. Think about SEO. Popular blogs usually have got very good SEO stats and Google Pagerank (mine is 5/10 now). With contribution you get that important link and Google notices high page rank website linking to new one in that way showing that your site is pretty good quality. You must work on SEO and spreading the word in daily basis, and guest posting is excellent starting point in order to get noticed.
5. Spreading the word. Your article will get big attention just by publishing it on popular blog, people love to get listened and be in spotlight. I love to see how people assess my work, leave positive feedback and finally help to spread the word!

Well, I haven’t got very good English skills just yet, but I hope you got my point! :)

If you would like to be part of 1stwebdesigner, please write to dainis@1stwebdesigner.com and I am sure we will think of something!

I am really hoping on little relief, so I can stop producing never ending list posts, but start to work on quality web design photoshop tutorials to really bring value to this site!

By the way I am still working on *.pdf document with roundup of all the posts done in the last year, you will be able to download soon. And as soon as I can I will start e-mail newsletter, but I will tell more about it later.

Partnership with Iconshock Projects

As always I keep the best at the end. I received amazing partnership proposal from IconShock Projects company. IconShock Projects is specialized in professional stock icon for web and software application creation, I really love their website! So to the point – they are offering to give away FREE icon sets (specifically designed for 1stwebdesigner website and our audience) each month without any restriction to use in your own projects!

Almost every icon set will consist of 5 individually designed and unique icons and the best thing of all is that you will be the ones to choose what kind of icon set you want to see here created!! Sound pretty cool, right? To prove quality, check these examples Iconshock Projects company did for Smashing Magazine.

I welcome you to suggest your own ideas, what kind of icons you want to see here created, but to get started I created poll with 5 different icon set suggestions.

• Classic blogging icons – I mean icons usually bloggers tend to use in their blogs to describe visually search, popular articles, latest comments, archive, write for us or about us sections!
• Twitter Icons – Twitter is a huge trend and I thought 5 different Twitter birds should be really handy  to visually describe what you are doing or trying to tell!
• RSS Icons – visually catching RSS subscribe button is one of the most important visual aspects in good blog. I am thinking not only about classic RSS button but also something more interesting under the post – something similar like I’ve got on my site, but something more beautiful!
• Social Networking Icons – let’s pick 5 the most useful social networking sites for design – Digg, StumbleUpon, DesignBump, DesignMoo and Delicious bookmarking service!
• Web Development Icons – something similar like blogging icons, just more focused on private projects than blogging itself!

That’s it for now – please be active and cast your vote so you can get free icon set you want the most!