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.

What is a landing page and where it is usually used?

Basically a landing page is a powerful online marketing tool – it’s a unique webpage, also known as a lead capture page, where your task is to persuade visitors to complete a certain action for example:

• to subscribe to your newsletter in exchange for an ebook or product demo
• buy your product
• to register for a webinar

Your main goal is to create a landing page that encourages your visitors to complete a specific action. That’s far from being an easy task, landing page creation is an art, which is very hard to master, and even when you do you still need to do a lot of A/B testing to adjust your assumptions about how your visitors think and to see what works and what doesn’t.

Landing pages are widely used to launch webinars or products, pre launches, persuade visitors to give you their email address with the help of ebooks, email courses, special discounts. And as we all known once you have a visitors email address you can communicate with them on a much more personal level, which helps to establish relationships and also encourage them to do what you wish them to do.

In this article you will be taken through each important step in order to create a successful landing page, capable of converting visitors into customers. If I didn’t succeed in explaining what a landing page is read the Wikipedia explanation or this great Hubspot blog article.

(Strobecorp – beautiful and minimal landing page example)

How to use this guide?

This article is separated into sections starting from landing page structure, color usage, copywriting, how to write great headlines, tips on how to improve an existing landing page, templates, tools to use, a/b testing tools, analysis of some of the best landing page examples and more. Feel free to jump to the sections to learn what you find most important, though if you take the time to read this entire guide section by section, I can assure you, you will know more about landing pages than 99% of the rest of the industry!

Well, now that you know what to expect here, shall we start?

How to know when to create a landing page? Where are landing page used?

You can use landing pages together with:

• ad campaigns through Adwords
• guest writing
• email newsletter
• product launch
• product pre launch
• coming soon page
• etc.

When you run campaigns it’s not smart to send people to your home page. Usually your Home page doesn’t explain a lot about your product, you need to make it as easy as possible for visitors to do what you want them to do. If you want to promote your latest product, webinar or ebook, make it as simple as possible. Point them to a special landing page where they can do just that! If you know where your audience comes from, learn about them and make it as related as possible.

When you run special campaigns on a website, for example a giveaway, greet them and customize your message! Make sure there isn’t any confusion what you want them to do (call to action) and build your landing page around this call to action. Simple is better, remember that!

(Milk Inc. minimal landing page clearly shows how less is better).

Landing page anatomy (step by step parts in landing pages)

Before we start I’ll explain a few terms I will be using:

Visitor – visitors who come to your landing page, potential customers

Product – product in this case would mean an ebook, email newsletter,t raining, webinar, article etc.

Introduction

The best product launch is when you have a product other people will love so much that they will tell other people about it! And your product must be just like that, whether it is for a global audience or a very specific one, the first thing you need is a great product place and the landing page is the place to show it off and explain in simple words why your visitors need it!

Make your product desirable and memorable.

The Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page

This is a great infographic visually explaining the most important sections of a landing page and how to direct visitors attention.

Top Page Headline

This is usually the first section a visitor will see as headlines are usually big and you need to make sure you explain what you’re offering here and what the page is about in a few seconds! What problem do you solve and why your visitors should care about it.

For example in this article the headline is:

Landing Pages Guide 101: Create Landing Pages that Work

You know straight away what to expect, you’re going to find a comprehensive guide on how to create landing pages that work! Make your message as simple and clear to understand as possible! Peoples attention spans are very short and great products aren’t used or articles aren’t read just because someone wrote a crappy headline!

Make sure your ad copy targets visitors to the right page to fulfill expectations:

Bonus tip: use the same color palette or graphics on your landing page as in your ad copy assuring visitors that they came to the right place when they clicked on ad. Example from MojoThemes campaign below.

One Clear Call to Action

Build the whole landing page around your call to action, because it’s the main focus right? You created a landing page to get your visitors to complete a certain action and because of that make sure the call to action is easy to notice, whatever it is – subscribe box, buy button, form you want them to fill out.

Make sure your call to action is above the fold (basically it’s on the page visitors see without scrolling, approx 500px height). Some minimal landing pages even just put their whole message above the fold, making sure visitors don’t need to do ANY scrolling and keep their message super simple! You must aim for this goal too!

I’ve already mentioned how important it is to have one clear call to action and how you should build your landing page around it, but I wanted to emphasize this and include some more articles you will find extremely useful if you want to know how to create a memorable call to action or how to can improve your landing page to focus more on your main goal:

• Call to Action Buttons: Examples and Best Practices – the best learning curve is by analyzing real life examples and this article is just about that!
• 7 Tips for Effective Calls to Action – simple article from HubSpot emphasizing on 7 tips everyone must know before deciding on his call to action!
• Design: 10 techniques for an effective ‘call to action’ – beautifully written and designed article, no fluff talk, clear action tips there.
• 10 Essential Tips to Make Your Call to Action Buttons Effective - even more tips to think about.

(Shipmentapp has no distractions, just one clear call to action).

Clear Headlines

The same way you use your headline you should use subheadlines. Use them to emphasize your message as you explain to your visitor what your product is about. Put the same attention into subheadlines as you put into your main headline, because you want your visitor to keep reading, you want to keep them engaged until he is sure your product is what he wants!

Note: continue reading the section about copywriting because the art of headline creation is really complicated and requires a lot of learning to master.

Page Content

All the page content should be focused on what your main headline says and a single, focused message and, of course, your call to action. Make sure you list the benefits of your product, not just your product features, you’re the most proud of. When you create page content, you need to think from a visitors point of view. Will they be interested in the features you offer, or how these features will benefit them?

Keep your most important content at the top of the page together with bullet points, because most visitors at the beginning tend to scan a page and you need to grab their attention to get them interested enough to read further.

For example, if:

• feature is – Create a website without any coding skills
• benefit is – You can save time by creating a website without any need to learn programming or spending a lot of money to hire a designer or programmer.

Make sure your 3 or 4 most important benefits are immediately clear.

You can also emphasize some of your content by making it bold or italicizing as I have done right below.

Tip: Focus on just three key benefits or ‘pain points’ you solve and no more! This will help your visitor to easily understand what your product is about, and more importantly, how it will benefit them.

Page content is also the place where you tell your story, build trust by showing your experience and address your audience by showing pain points they have and how you will solve them. When you tell this story, break your content up every 2-3 sentences to avoid the page looking cluttered. This is also why you need to use bullet points and numbered lists as I’ll discuss in the next section.

Write your content from a second person’s perspective – “You” addresses visitors much more directly than boring formal text.

Make sure you proofread and that there are no spelling or grammatical errors, your product will look much more professional and trustworthy!

Also don’t put too much text, because research shows 90% of the population doesn’t like to do much reading, which means headlines, images, video, and bullet points will get much more attention, where content may not get much at all.

(SlideDeck’s landing page shows how even with many elements you can still make a landing page look clean and simple).

Use Bullet points and numbered lists

Making use of this formatting will help your visitor understand what your product is about, the value you provide and what your message is. It will also simplify your layout, and simple is always better as peoples attention spans are super short.

Use Images

Images often explain more than words can – why do you think infographics are so widely popular? Infographics bring text together with images that require little to no explanation, I always encourage my readers to use images in articles, because visual relation is much more powerful than textual, as is our memory.

(StumbleUpon did a very good redesign and their homepage makes great use of beautiful images).

Use Videos

And videos explain more than any single image could, you have a chance to show yourself, let people hear your voice, show them you’re a real person and it’s a great way to explain what your product is about and let your visitor just sit back and listen instead of browsing the page, trying to understand what he sees and whether he needs your product or not.

Social Promotion

If you are offering something of great value then of course visitors want to share your great product with their friends right? Make it easy for them and provide social promotion links, but remember to use just the most popular services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and nothing else. Keep it simple and try to place these links in a way that they don’t distract your visitors.

Here is a great spot to run A/B testing to make sure your social links don’t distract visitors from your main message.

Provide security

When you are asking for visitors personal information,  they will often have some anxiety about giving it to you, so you need to make sure you build enough trust!

You need to think like your visitor, why do they have that anxiety? They receive a lot of spam, scams and cold calls from sales people so you need to explain that this is not the case here, right?

You can build trust with:

• high quality design and strong branding – for example I receive a lot of emails from people asking to check out their service, article, or help them promote it, but when I visit a site and it’s looks crappy  and has a terrible logo – I immediately close the page without even reading further! Presentation is so important, your product should look (in)credible!
• testimonials – once you have grateful clients make sure to get recommendations from them! It’s even better if you can get testimonials from popular people in your industry or get mentioned on popular blogs.
• 30 day money back guarantee, third-party security certification like SSL cerificate, guarantee seal.

What should call to action forms or buttons look like?

Usually your call to action will be subscribing to an email newsletter or a request to buy the product. It’s a very hard to decide how long your form should be, for example is it enough to just ask for their email, or do you need  your visitors name? It’s up to you, but try to keep your form as short as possible, the more input you require from your visitor the less likely they will go through with it. Ask for the least amount of information you need – the less information you require, the more signups you’ll get, simple as that.

It’s even harder with buy buttons because the next step is usually a request for their personal banking or credit card information. I recommend using my personal favorite, Paypal checkout, which is fast and simple and doesn’t require your visitor to share their personal financial information with you.

You can add some fields that will help you learn more about your customer, but make them optional, not required. A better option is to show these fields after subscribing -

Experiment with button and form size, usually bigger buttons perform better than smaller less noticeable ones.

Text on button

The default text is Submit, but studies show that it’s better to use something like Click Here or Go, but you can also take a different approach by making buttons more engaging and relevant to your offering like “Get Your Free Ebook Now!”, “Subscribe for news!”, “Get access now!” or “Download now”.

(Posterous has a beautiful, simple, landing page and good examples with call to action buttons).

Thank you page

Once your visitor has completed your call to action make sure you show your appreciation by simply saying thanks, offering a cool freebie or by directing them to related information on your site they may be  interested in.

On this page you might choose to give access to your product (if it’s something they can download), give more details and put the download link.

If you chose to not use social promotion on your landing page, you can use it here – ask them to share this offer or product with their friends!

Now you will usually have collected your visitors email address so keep them engaged and follow up there. I won’t get into this topic right now as we’ll have a separate section explaining how to make use of your email list.

Colors

You must also have a clear and basic understanding of colors, because different colors convey different meanings and are perceived differently. Check these three articles to learn some basics about how to use colors in web design and your landing pages.

• Empathizing Color Psychology in Web Design – learn the meaning of different colors and then check how another popular websites use color in their designs.
• Why Color Matters – self explaining headline here.
• Color Theory for Designers, Part 1: The Meaning of Color – in depth study about color theory in webdesign with good examples.

How to pick the right font?

I didn’t want to go in depth in this topic, instead I found a good article for you to read if you want to know more.

• What’s the Best Font For Your Site? (The Psychology of Fonts) – it’s a tough to decide what kind of font you should use in your website, landing pages, do you need to use several fonts? This article aims to help you to get basic understanding in fonts.

(Fonts can make or break the landing page, Tumblr does it right with professional fonts and effective use of whitespace).

Pricing tables - How to choose product price and how many options to offer

It’s a scary place to be thinking about how to price your product – you don’t want to price it too low and undervalue your product, and you don’t want to set the price too high and turn people off. How do you decide how many pricing options to offer and how to choose the actual product price?

It all depends on the exclusivity you provide, if you can make it look desirable, you’ll probably have no problem charging a higher price, but your landing page copy better be well written should be very well  to create that desire, need and rush that will convince them your product will help them change their life or business! And yes, if you charge a high price be sure you can deliver – people want to get what they paid for!

I like to think it’s better to set prices higher, and then offer discounts and experiment with your price point. As for the options – I think the best choice is to have one price, one call to action, but if you really need more, don’t have more than three plans. Too many choices will just confuse your visitor and he will turn away! Ah, and if you have more plans, be sure to offer a top choice, which should be the best value, to make it easier for your visitors to choose!

But here I will repeat what everybody is repeating a lot already – do A/B testing, don’t assume anything, just test it and know for sure what works and what doesn’t!

Here are two articles on this topic from SocialTriggers to help you make an even better decision on pricing:

• How to Increase Your Prices by 71% – power or perception, choose the right words and increase your prices!
• Here’s How “Product Context” Helps You Sell More Stuff Online – few action steps how to price your product using some simple and smart techniques.

..and a bit of inspiration, how a good pricing table should look and how to differentiate several plans:

• 40 Fantastic Pricing Tables for Your Inspiration – plain, brilliant inspiration here!
• Pricing Tables: Examples And Best Practices – this is an old article from SmashingMag (2008) but principles don’t change, a lot of great advice there.
• Price Anchoring: The Power of Comparison Pricing Tables on a Subconscious Level – some good examples and small, but very valuable advice on pricing table comparison power.
• Pricing Tables – Best Practices, Tips and Inspiration – article from our own 1WD, where you will learn about pricing table structure, design, where to put emphasis. All those tips come together with related examples under the scope.

Tips on how to create, or improve, your landing page and some useful articles

Here I will again cover and repeat some tips you should really remember again and again while designing your landing page, and if you have already have a landing page, then check these tips to improve your page! For example did you know? “Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold.”

1. Put the most important content above the fold, did you know 80% of web users spend their time at looking at information above the page fold and only 20% of their attention goes below the fold? Ok, admittedly, the research is a bit old and the way people are viewing the Internet has changed, but it’s a huge difference! Most people will view just above the fold, be aware of that!
2. Simplify your form/ Use a simple button in order to make the page as easy to understand as possible and the call to action as easy to complete as possible!
3. Reduce distractions - remove visual clutter, make use of white space, hide navigation, if you have one there and don’t use links which will drive visitors away from your landing pages…every little mistake adds up and results in less sales and completed action steps for you!
4. Use white space to direct the eye to the sections you want and effective use of whitespace will also make your site look cleaner and more professional.
5. Optimize landing page for search engines to make use of search traffic as well, which will be huge in the long run!
6. Only have one call to action on the landing page, but repeat it several times throughout the page if your page is longer. Good practice is to always have the call to action visible as he scrolls. I also want to take this opportunity to remind you not to have long landing pages, however if you have one, then include one call to action at the top, middle and lastly, one at the bottom.
7. Make sure your page loads fast - people don’t like to wait, attention spans are short and if you keep them waiting too long, they won’t wait at all. The same way you need to keep your landing page simple, keep your code clean and the images and video optimized.
8. Use heat maps to see where people are clicking the most, by doing this you’ll also notice sections where people tend to click, but which aren’t clickable  - this means you should test your landing page more to make it super simple to understand and help your visitor complete your preferred action.
9. Put email privacy information right next to the email input box, simple text – “We don’t spam and hate spam as much as you do.” can work wonders and build trust.

(Instagram’s landing page clearly shows it’s app for iPhone, it’s free and there is one call to action – download app from AppStore).

Here are some related links you should read for some really in depth knowledge about landing pages:

• Elements Of A Viral Launch Page – beautiful article from SmashingMag, where you will learn everything you need to know about viral launch page creation together with some great, carefully analyzed examples.
• 7 Steps for the Perfect Landing Page – seven important steps you need to take in order to improve or create good landing page.
• 29 Tips to Improve Your Nonprofit Website’s Landing Pages – non-profit landing pages guide don’t mean you can’t use these techniques in commercial products, just author has huge experience in nonprofit page creation, which is great for article, newsletter, page, deal promotion for example
• Seal the Deal: 10 Tips for Writing the Ultimate Landing Page – CopyBlogger always nails it, some useful tips there!
• 5 Landing Page Mistakes that Crush Conversion Rates – ..and some mistakes most people make and you need to avoid!

Copywriting importance, learn art of copywriting

The art of copywriting is actually the art of keeping your readers engaged from the first word to the last. Keep them engaged in your content with bullet points, sub headlines, the artful use of formatting. Make your content flow so seamlessly that before your visitor is even at the middle of the page they desire your product and are already wanting to complete your call to action! It’s a very hard art to master and here are several articles to help you learn copywriting. If you read these articles, when you finish you’ll know more about copywriting than most people do, and that’s a huge advantage over your competitors:

• 6 Secret Techniques You Can Use To Become A Great Headline Writer - A  great headline is similar to the trailer before the movie. It whets the appetite and gives the reader a taste of what is to come. The purpose of a headline is to compel the reader to continue on to the next step (read your copy).
• Five Copywriting Errors That Can Ruin A Company’s Website – sometimes it works to learn what mistakes most people and maybe even you make, learn how to avoid them in the first place!
• Copywriting 101: Your Guide to Effective Copy – collection of articles from CopyBlogger, first place I visit whenever I run into any copywriting problems or have any uncertainties.
• How to Write Magnetic Headlines - one more collection from CopyBlogger teaching you simply how write effective, magnetic headlines.
• How to Write Headlines That Work – and simple action steps to perform whenever you write any headline.

Templates to get you started:

You can find a lot of great templates online, some you can use right away that will help you kickstart your business! I think templates are great place to start, I recommend a lot of A/B testing and once you’re ready and know what you need, you can hire a designer or a coder to develop your own unique landing page that converts really well! These templates are very cheap and should are perfect to get you started!

Landing page templates from UnBounce – here you’ll find a lot of great templates, you’ll be able to edit in WSIWYG editor easily without any coding experience! UnBounce has huge experience in this market, so you can be sure you’ll be in good hands to get started.

Themeforest

Themeforest is a huge marketplace, selling everything from WordPress themes to landing pages! Even if you don’t end up buying a premium design, these are great source of inspiration! Here is a link to their landing page category, order these by sales to see the most popular landing pages on that site.

A few of my favorites:

Conversation ($10)

Conversion is a premium HTML landing page. Its great structure and clean, professional design as well as a variety of page templates allow it to fit to both transactional and reference landing pages.The main goal of a landing page is to convert visitors into customers, therefore the layout is specially designed and fitted with a variety of features that will make that happen. Coupled with a structure that’s highly customizable, this product will be perfect for your product, service or company presentation.

View Demo

Lista ($8)

Lista Landing Page is a premium landing page design for your newsletter or download, even just a service, your choice! Lista Landing Page makes good use of the Z Reading pattern to guide the eye around the design and ultimately convert your visitors in to subscribers or buyers.

View Demo

Integro ($8)

Integro is a Corporate HTML /CSS landing page. It has a clean, professional design with a Definitive Call to Action. Integro is a powerful Landing Page with features like Live AJAX Form Submission, Pricing Table, Lightbox, Tooltips, 2 Types of Galleries and Image Sliders. You get started with Integro within minutes & only handful of Customizations with well documented HTML / CSS / JS & PHP .

View Demo

Online tools you can use to create landing pages

Ok, this is the more advanced stuff! Once you know a bit more about what you need even if you don’t really think that you can code and design landing pages yourself there are a bunch of amazing online premium tools you can use to build your own landing page in no time! Often those tools come together with helpful tips on how to design a landing page and some even include A/B testing! I did a lot of  research and these tools are the best ones I found and tested! Get started right now!

Premise

This is a handy premium WordPress plugin create by CopyBlogger Media for easy landing page creation. You won’t have any more problems creating unique pages, which look good and go seemingly with your own WordPress blog. I bought myself this plugin some time ago and I must say it is easy to use. The tutorials helped me learn a lot about landing page creation and for quick results don’t look any further.

I think this is the best tool for landing page creation without need to hire a designer to do the job, however of course for advanced solutions you still would need to search for help, but for most cases it’s enough with Premise. In their features you’ll also find included A/B testing through WordPress and even SEO tools letting you get all the data you could need from your page.

It’s a bit pricy ($85), but if you need to create a lot of landing pages, it is certainly worth the money.

Unbounce

Unbounce is online software you can use to create your landing pages. Everything is broken down into easy steps: build a page (choose from 276 templates), publish it, drive traffic and check results and in the end do A/B testing and optimize your landing page. This is a good site and if you need a cheaper solution, pick Unbounce – it has a 30 day free trial and the most basic plan costs only $25 per month.

KickOffLabs

KickOffLabs is another popular choice for landing page creation, they are trying to push social promotion into your landing pages encouraging you to be social, which is handy.

Their WYSIWYG editor is also very easy to use, you can easily pick from good color schemes and edit different elements easily. Only thing I think is missing here is advanced features for bigger landing pages with many elements, but if you want simple – KickOffLabs will be a great solution for you.

Check their dashboard below – everything is there explained in 1-2 sentences, the learning curve is very small. Ah and yes, for one landing page KickOffLabs is free, but for advanced features you may need to pay as much as $20.

Related reading:

• The Non-Designer’s Swiss Army Knife of Free Tools to Make Sweet Landing Pages - Ah and consider this article for related reading. Here you’ll find a lot of helpful resources, online tools achieving different professional design effects, which can be very useful if you want to do everything yourself:

Importance of converting landing page and A/B testing

Once you have created your landing page, don’t stop there, you should always be testing – even if you can improve your page conversion rate by 4-5%, calculate how much it could improve your performance in the long run! Don’t make assumptions about what works, I bet you’ll get a lot of surprises through A/B testing!

With A/B testing you can test everything  –  headlines, content, bulleted lists, video placements, call to action forms, looks, colors, formatting – you get the picture. Services like Amazon have done countless A/B testing and are still doing it all the time trying hundreds and thousands of different tweaks, while this is extreme you should learn from them and keep improving yourself!

Here are several helpful resources I found to help you delve much deeper in this topic:

• The Ultimate Guide To A/B Testing – introduction to A/B testing, basic explanations what to test, how to create your first A/B test together with Do’s and Don’ts and real studies.
• The Guaranteed Way to Radically Improve Your Copywriting – guide from Copyblogger, beginning is little similar as previous article, but here you’ll get explained the magic of A/B testing – guessing game where simple text change increase conversations by 25%! Powerful!
• A/B Test Case Study: Single Page vs. Multi-Step Checkout – nothing is better than real case studies showing how to do A/B testing!
• Which Test Won? – this site runs a lot of different A/B tests, puts them online and create inspiring game from it! How good is your gut? Which version performed better – A or B? After you choose you can see actual A/B test results! Sharpen your skills here!
• An Introduction to A/B Testing – one more explanation about A/B testing taking little bit different approach.

Tools For Landing Page Optimization ( A/B testing) – Measure Results

Ok, this is super important – I know, I know it’s too much at first – so many little things you need to know, be aware of and at the end really you still cannot assume anything! You need to test it! And to be honest for a long time this topic was like rocket science to me! I didn’t know how to get started, A/B testing felt like too complex a topic and too hard to figure out and use…

But not anymore with these amazing tools we can use these days!

These are the most popular choices:

• http://www.optimizely.com/
• http://unbounce.com/
• http://www.hubspot.com/
• http://google.com/websiteoptimizer

Optimizely

Yes, I joined many Optimizely supporters and think it is the best tool available for now! It’s very advanced, yet very easy to use with everything you need built in for serious A/B testing! I just registered and right away I was ready to do an experimental test!

It is really as easy as they promise on website:

• Enter your website’s URL below and create variations of your website in minutes.
• Copy and paste your one-line Optimizely snippet onto the pages you want to test or measure as goals.
• Start your experiment and learn which variation performed best!

Here you can read more in detail how Optimizely works.

Optimizely isn’t free (starting from $17/monthly), but it has a 30 day trial and I totally recommend it as a top choice for running any tests!

Heatmaps

Together with A/B testing heat maps also can be very useful to see where people click, scroll on your live version, maybe there is image on your site where people click, but it’s not a link? Maybe in that case you need to make that section clickable or change the image to avoid distractions?

CrazyEgg

This is the most popular heat mapping service, which I use personally. It also has a handy WordPress plugin allowing you to automatically add tracking code, making the whole testing process even easier!

If you were wondering if there are any alternatives to CrazyEgg, there is also a very popular heat mapping service called ClickTale, which is similar, but it has some interesting extra features such as visitor recording, conversion funnels and campaign tracking.

Blogs to read to get even more:

Landing page creation, optimization, A/B testing – all these little bits require ongoing learning if you really want to be ahead of your competitors and improve your conversion rates. It’s very hard to keep track of this changing world all by yourself, but it’s super easy if you know where to search for high quality content! These blogs focus just on these topics and I recommend adding these sites to your RSS reader so you are always the first to know about the newest tests, tools and techniques:

• Hubspot Blog
• Formstack blog section about landing pages
• Socialtriggers offers a lot of unique opinion about email list building and online sale increasing. Each of his articles are very detailed and comprehensive – he doesn’t post often, but when he does basically every article receives hundreds of comments and goes viral.
• Unbounce blog landing page section

Do you know any more useful blogs or resources about this topic? Share away!

What is DNS?

That is the customary question that we got to answer when we are discussing something as vast as DNS. Basically, DNS (Domain Name System) is responsible for translating human friendly website URLs like www.1stwebdesigner.com to computer readable IP addresses like 148.68.30.27 (just an example). You know, our mind cannot remember combination of such digits so we devised a system which helps convert these IP addresses to English names and vice versa.

Please understand that DNS isn’t a localized system where all the IP addresses corresponding to every website present on this planet is stored. If that was the case then an unimaginable amount of care would be required to keep such a huge database working. Also, having a localized DNS would be against the distributed character of the Internet.

Rather, DNS is a distributed service which is actually a collective group of name servers (which we call as “nameserver” in Internet lingo). These nameservers constantly refer to each other in order to stay updated with the changes that are rolled out every now and then. The process sounds simple but it is quite complex.

So, every website has a nameserver?

Well, technically speaking, yes! Though it’s a different case that one nameserver will be used for multiple websites. Otherwise, we would end up having 100 million nameservers for 100 million domains – which makes no sense. Like, I host a domain of mine on DreamHost.com. So, they give me nameservers like ns1.dreamhost.com, ns2.dreamhost.com and ns3.dreamhost.com. Now, DreamHost is giving these nameservers to almost every client that they have. So, these three nameservers basically have almost all the IP address to URL details of every DreamHost client.

A basic flow of request on the Internet

When you type Google.com in your browser then a lot of stuff happens behind the scenes before you get to see the Google homepage. The image below tries to explain the flow of request.

Let me try to make it bit more clearer:

• When you visit a website URL via your browser then Windows will look for the corresponding IP address stored in the nameservers of your ISP.
• If the IP address is found then the request is directly sent to that IP address henceforth reducing the execution time.
• If the IP address is not found locally then the request is sent to the cloud of Internet and your browser waits for the virtual world to do its job.
• Every website has a nameserver associated with itself. Henceforth, that particular nameserver receives that request and sends it to the respective IP address.
• If that nameserver does not have the IP address details then it communicates with other nameservers and they with others. The request flows in the Internet till correct IP details are attained.
• Once the IP address is known then the request is sent to the particular IP address and data is served.

What is “48 hours delay”?

Usually, when you are about to change the nameservers for your domain or when you are hosting a fresh domain then your hosting company will tell you that it might take up to 48 hours for the information to be updated. Technically speaking, they are correct. It might take up to 48 hours for all nameservers on this planet to connect with every other nameserver and keep themselves in sync. You see, it’s a huge virtual world out there. But, my personal experience says that it usually takes less than 24 hours for the global update to complete. Still, you should consider the 48 hour delay in your time plan before you make any changes.

The below image via Wikipedia will give you an idea of hierarchical DNS, organized into zones, each served by a nameserver.

How and when does caching occur?

Nice question. You got the information for Google.com request that you had sent some time back. Now, that information is saved in the local ISP’s nameservers so that next time your request isn’t sent to third-party nameservers. But, after a stipulated time period these nameservers contact other nameservers so that their information isn’t outdated. This is where the term TTL comes into play.

What is TTL?

TTL (or Time To Live) is the time period that comes in along with the IP address info. This time period information is sent by the third-party nameserver along with the IP address. The value is usually in seconds and it is more like a suggestion from the third-party nameserver that you can stay away from me for X seconds and still stay updated. Come back after X seconds and I will pass on the latest information.

Usually the TTL value is 12 hours or 24 hours. This can be set to a custom number as and when required to reduce traffic.

Other types of DNS lookups

Once DNS started to serve the IP address lookup (as discussed above), then it was time to expand. DNS was later on used for other type of lookups, two of which we will discuss below:

• A Record – A Record lookup is something that we have already discussed. The IP address lookup is actually the A Record lookup for DNS.
• MX Record – MX (which is acronym for “mail exchanger”) is used for email address lookups. Usually when a tool tries to send an email to mail box related to your domain then it will look for MX record of your domain. This MX record will have another domain (something like mail.yourdomain.com) as its value. Now the A Record for this MX record will be checked to get the target IP address.
• CNAME Record – CNAME (stands for Canonical Name Record) is actually an alias for another domain name. This comes in handy when you want to use your own domain and data from another website. Like, during the ancient Internet Age (when blogspot.com was luxury), blogspot.com had a feature (they still have it) where you can use your own domain (yourdomain.com) instead of using the bogspot’s sub-domain for your blogspot hosted blog. In this case all that Google would do was ask you to change the CNAME of yourdomain.com to your blogspot’s sub-domain and the job is done. Whenever one would visit yourdomain.com then the data from your blogspot’s sub-domain will be delivered although the sub-domain won’t be visible in address bar.

Other usage of DNS

Other then the three lookups that I discussed above, DNS can be used for many other functions like:

• As I discussed before, domain names and nameservers do not have a one-to-one matching. This gives the hosting companies the chance for shared hosting and save a lot on money invested. Here, multiple domains can result into one IP address. This means one machine can host many websites. Additionally, one domain can point to multiple IP addresses. This helps in redundancy and high availability.
• The DNS system can be used to save and share IP addresses of blacklisted email hosts. Such databases are available for free in order to fight spam.
• These days software makers save the version of a software in the DNS database. This way the client machine connects to find out the latest version of the software available. It connects to the software maker’s server only if a new version is available. This helps in reducing the requests that client machines get.

Now I should probably start rambling about all the benefits of having a huge e-mail list to give you the necessary incentive to read this guide from start to finish. But I’d rather amaze you with this awesome infographic that we made for this post:

This pretty “litte” infographic is nothing else but the visual recap of what you’re about to read. If you’ve fallen in love with it from the first sight you can easily save the full version available under “click for full size” button. Ok. Enough about the infographic, let’s get to the actual post:

Your e-mail marketing campaign starts from getting people to opt-in to your e-mail list. Even if you are able to convert 10% of your visitors into sales (which is nonsense), 90% are leaving your site without a trace! That’s a huge opportunity being lost here! You have to get their e-mail and try to sell your product to them a bit later!

There is an infinite number of ways to have people tell you their e-mail addresses, however all of them seem to fall into 3 different categories: ask, force and trick.

News – visiting your website over and over for new updates might not be so handy, especially when you post them infrequently. Ask people to leave their e-mails to send the news directly to their inboxes and you’ll be amazed by the number of subscribers.

Discounts & Promotions – wouldn’t you like to receive a text message every time your favourite clothing store announces a 50% off sale? So are your visitors – offer them “e-mail only” discounts and watch your list grow.

Freebies – did you ever submit your e-mail address to receive a link to download a free e-book? I bet most of you will say “Yes”. This is where you’re giving out your e-mail to get some value in return. If you have some piece of unique content (e-book, e-mail course, infographic, spreadsheet, cheatsheet, product guide, shopping guide, video, audio, podcast) – create an opt-in form, where people have to leave their e-mail addresses to receive that content.

Report – yes, it may also be considered as a freebie, but I felt like I should make a separate point out of it. Industry reports, which can really help people in their jobs/businesses are a holy grail which people are always looking for. I personally receive about a dozen different reports, and they are extremely helpful! Reports tend to have the biggest open rates, as people are actually looking forward to receiving them. The downside is that you need to work hard to keep the quality level of your reports as high as possible.

Do you happen to sell a product with a high learning curve? You’re lucky, as you can offer your customers a “tips & tricks” campaign right on the “Thank you for the purchase” page. Once they opt-in, you’ll be able to sell them accessories or related products with just a couple autoresponder e-mails being set up.

E-mail Course – is another widely spread tactic, worth a separate mention. An e-mail course is basically an auto-responder which consists of a certain number of e-mails. All you have to do is write the actual course about a specific topic, split it into several e-mails and setup the auto-responder to send an e-mail once in a while. A catchy course title and prominent placement of a subscription form will do the rest.

Squeeze pages – a simple “free newsletter” box in your sidebar may not work very well, instead you can pitch your subscription using one of those long sales letters. Then, once in a while, as you write a blog post, you can mention your newsletter and give a link to your squeeze page, which will do the job of convincing people to opt-in.

E-mail list brokers will most likely pitch you that the ROI from purchasing (or even rental) of some third-party e-mail list will cover all your expenses, but in most cases that is not true. Just like the search traffic is your most targeted and high converting of all, your own e-mail list will work much better than any rental one. Put your money and efforts into your own list, rather than purchasing if from third parties.

Existing contacts – you might already have a large contact list of your friends/colleagues/customers, you might as well collect contact information from your payment receipts. Well, adding everyone to your newsletter may get you into big trouble, as people might simply mark you as SPAM. What you CAN do, is e-mail them a link to your squeeze page and have them voluntarily opt-in to receive your newsletters in the future.

Expiration – once you have posted some free content, you may hide it behind an log-in form after some time. This way a returning visitor, who has watched your video, read your report or used your free tool will be forced to register and leave his e-mail to get access to this content again.

Members only – there might be a “members only” area on your website, which should be really attractive and be enough incentive that people leave their e-mails to get access to it.

Contests/Sweepstakes – you may list your newsletter subscription as an obligatory condition to enter, but note that this can somewhat decrease the number of participants.

Registration – speaking about the laziness, when was the last time you clicked the privacy policy link, which is given once you register somewhere? In most cases, you agree to receiving the newsletter of that company :)

Commenters – you can easily turn your commenters into subscribers by adding a checkbox to a comment form, which is checked by default. Again people are too lazy to be attentive, that’s why they will just leave a comment and opt-in.

Testimonials/Reviews/UGC – the trick is exactly the same as with comments, but this time you’re asking for a testimonial or some sort of review or feedback and put that tiny newsletter checkbox, which lots of people will overlook; (just in case – UGC stands for User Generated Content)

Once you have some people on your list, why not to use them to grow your list even more?
Add social buttons and endorse people to share the information with their friends. You’ll have to create a web-based version of your e-mail, so that once a person clicks the twitter icon in his e-mail, his friends will land on it’s web-based version, which can be equipped with a subscription box. According to MailChimp survey over 70% of people forward/share commercial e-mails less than once or month or never, but still a 30% chance is worth it!

Surveys/Quizzes – I bet many of you got really pissed off by a request to leave an e-mail in order to get a result of a 50-question-long quiz that you just thoroughly passed from start to finish. Well, “you just got punk’d” – either leave your e-mail, or you will never know the result and half an hour of your life will be lost :)

Polls/Tools – once you participate in a poll, the system may offer you to e-mail the final results once it ends, so that you can use them for future reference. Alternatively you can create a tool, like a price calculator, and add an option to e-mail the results to a customers inbox, so that he had an access to this information once he needs it.

Now you know the most common ways to get people to opt-in to your newsletter and the second logical part would be to actually implement them on your website. Ever heard of CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)? This is basically a number of techniques to have your website visitors do what you want them to do. Newsletter signup forms are yet another object for CRO best practices, which mainly rely on location, size and color.

Lightbox – yes, that’s extremely irritating when the website you visit gets greyed out and some message appears above the fold. Yet studies show that this thing gathers e-mails like crazy! And besides, there are some cool plugins, that allow you to control whether to show the lightbox right away, or wait till a person visits two or three pages of your website (and lots of other things can be configured actually).

Sidebar – the most common place to put your newsletter subscription forms. This way they will be highly visible and won’t irritate anyone. What’s more important, is that you can actually have a number of different opt-ins in your sidebar: one for blog subscription, one for e-book download, one for a poll, etc.

Don’t forget to enhance your newsletter subscription box with the so-called risk removals as: “no spam” & “not selling to third parties”.

After the content – once a person reads your piece of content till the very end, you can tell that he is very interested in your resource, so why not to offer them to sign up? I really like the way Neil Patel from QuickSprout does it:

The e-mail opt-in process is usually full of the so-called “gate” pages that have close to no value – “thank you for registration” page, “please confirm your e-mail” page, etc. Try to put some call to action with a hot offer to those pages and see what the results will be.

Bottom – I’ve seen some websites having a newsletter subscription box sticking to the bottom of the browser window. If you ask me – that’s irritating. I wanted to show a screenshot of that practice, but it appears that those websites are no longer using it. But you can still try and see if it works for you.

Feedburner actually allows you to get a hold of your subscribers’ e-mail addresses, so if all the above methods are too time-consuming for you, use the Feedburner plugins to grow your e-mail list.

As a part of your signup box design, try using “Mad Libs” style for a chance of 25-40% conversion increase.

“I have the list, now what?” – that’s a fair question. Getting people to opt-in is actually not as hard as it may seem (especially following the above tips). The hard part is getting some value/revenue out of your list. The strategy (as well as the purpose) of your e-mail marketing campaign is mostly being determined by your business/niche, but here are some core things to do with your e-mail list:

Traffic – an e-mail to 10.000 people will obviously grant you an instant blast of a couple thousand visitors. Whatever you need this traffic for – you have it.

Cross Promotion – I did say that using a third-party list is way less effective as opposed to using your own one. However if you have a partner in your niche with a large e-mail list, and you know that his clients might be potentially interested in what you have to offer, you can ask him to mention you in his next e-mail newsletter. What you can do in return is mention him in yours. This practice is a sort of a cross promotion and it may give some really good results.

Relationship – being helpful and informative is a great way of building trust in your company/brand. Useful advice, product tips, industry reports – those are the things people are always looking for and you will surely get some credit for sharing those things.

Lots of people like to use their e-mail box as an archive: all the important e-mails are being carefully archived, so that they can refer to them later. Your e-mails should be the ones people would want to store – use a lot of data, citations, references, useful information and people will come back to your e-mails over and over.

Lead Nurturing – once you have a person’s e-mail address, there’s one more chance to convince them to buy your product/service. Don’t send the gibberish sales stuff that everyone is already sick of – be wise and nurture your future customers carefully. People love exclusivity, make them feel like they are in a special club and you’ll make that sale!

Studies show that 70% of people will read the whole e-mail or most of it. 

Sales – once you announce a new product, you can easily spread awareness and probably even get some instant sales. Other than that, you can include a discount code in your e-mail, which will be another incentive for people on your list to make a purchase.

Pro bloggers often stuff their newsletters with affiliate links to refer people and get some money once they make a purchase. When you mention some product/service in your newsletter, maybe you should check if it has an affiliate program?

Support – There is a post of “The Dirty Dozen” Marketing Processes that every internet start-up must master. And seems like about a half of those processes require you to send an e-mail to your customer.

Most of the numbers and graphics that I am about to use were taken from a free webinar by my favourite social media scientist Dan Zarella who was granted a dataset of 9,5 BILLION e-mail sends within MailChimp.

I will mention and comment on only a few of his findings and I strongly insist that you go and spend an hour watching this webinar from start to finish.

Timing – surprisingly, the highest possible Click Through Rate occurs on weekends. This is explained by the fact that on weekends people are not overloaded by incoming e-mails as well as have some free time to explore what’s there.

Frequency – The best frequency to get a higher Click Through Rate is the lowest one. However the graph shows that it won’t hurt to send an extra e-mail. And besides, you’ll get a lot more clicks from two e-mails with a slightly low CTR than from a one with a bigger CTR (simple math here).

Number of links – the more links you put in your e-mail, the higher CTR you get. Don’t be afraid to duplicate your links in the e-mail, present them in different type/context. It’s actually a good practice to list all your links with short comments at the very end of your e-mail.

Subscriber recency – your recent subscribers are likely to leave you real soon, and unfortunately that’s inevitable. Don’t panic when you see your numbers drop within the first few days after the campaign was launched, it’s totally ok.

Most of them will leave you anyway and there’s nothing much that you can do about it. Though what you CAN do is make it easy to unsubscribe. Why? Because reports show that people who cannot find the “unsubscribe” button, or find the process too hard and complicated will simply click the Spam button, which will dramatically affect your reputation across the e-mail network. Just make it easy to unsubscribe.

Reasons – we have previously discussed that an extra e-mail will not decrease your Click Through Rate that much, but still you should be careful with sending too many e-mails to your subscribers, and here’s why:

Analyzing the graph above, you might come up with a logical solution to save a decent percentage of your subscribers. Instead of just providing two options (a) receive e-mails and (b) not receive e-mails, you can actually offer them to change the frequency of the newsletter, for that is the #1 factor that bothers them. Perhaps an e-mail once a month rather than a weekly e-mail will save you a subscriber.

This e-mail marketing guide is already quite big, but there are still hundreds of things that you need to learn in order to become a successful e-mail marketer. Test, Measure & Optimize – those are the core things that take about a half of your e-mail marketing efforts:

Don’t SPAM – here is the document I strongly recommend you to read before you ruin your very first e-mail marketing campaign. (And here’s another one for “black hat” e-mail marketers :) )

Optimize for mobile – welcome to the mobile era! Studies show that 81% of people read their e-mails on mobile devices. And here’s what you want to do:

• avoid large images (67% of people do not “automatically download images”);
• avoid tables/columns (or ensure they look nice when shrunk to an iPhone size);
• avoid long e-mails (you don’t want mobile phone owners to burn their fingers scrolling);

Segment – lots of different people opt-in to your e-mail list. Why would you send the exact same e-mail to everyone? Here is just a couple of most commonly used segments:

• buyers vs non-buyers – statistics show that people who have purchased your product once are much more likely to buy again than those who have not purchased anything. It’s bloody obvious that those two groups should receive quite different e-mails.
• one-time-buyers vs repeat-buyers – though the difference between these two is not as big as above, you should apply a different approach to each of them.
• engaged vs not – you can quite easily track which of your subscribers are not clicking your links and not opening/responding your e-mails. Create a special segment for them and try to catch their attention.
• relevancy – you need to target your customers with communication, which is relevant to them. If you are able to get some more information about them (demographic, psychographic, behavioral patterns) – use it to create relevant segments.

Win-back – once you determine your “unresponsive” segment, you can try to reactivate it with a win-back or re-engagement campaign. This includes e-mailing them some special offers, offering to toggle the newsletter frequency, or asking if they still want to receive your e-mails at all.

A/B Testing – there’s nothing new about split testing the pages of your site, but split testing e-mails is not that widely spread. There are many parts of your e-mail message that you might consider for testing, here are some of them:

• e-mail subject
• sending time
• the layout
• body text
• closing text
• images

This definitely deserves a separate post, so I will only give you a taste. The well-known 80/20 rule can be applied here: 8 out of 10 people will read the subject and only 2 of 10 will read the e-mail itself. This fact makes it obvious that you should work really hard to polish your e-mail subject till it gets a decent open rate. In general, people will open your e-mail because your subject promises some information of an exceptional relevance to them or either persuades that there’s something exciting and entertaining inside. There’s an exceptional series of posts by CopyBlogger called “Magnetic Headlines” and blog post headlines and e-mail subject lines are pretty close – this should get you started.

Measure – there is a ton of metrics available for measurement, but if I were to choose one, I’d definitely pick MONEY. That is the only metric that shows the success of your marketing efforts – whether it’s e-mail marketing, search engine marketing or social media marketing. Configure your analytics to track how much money you get and optimize your campaign solely around this metric.

Tools – most of the tips that I have mentioned in this guide may seem like a nightmare to implement. However with such great online e-mail marketing tools as MailChimp, Aweber, iContact, and others you can actually do anything with just a few clicks of a mouse.

Reputation – these days SPAM filter gets social. Passing the good ol’ SPAM filter of a Gmail user is now only the half of the job. Since the time Google released it’s Priority Inbox feature, you need to actually get your e-mail marked as “Priority” to get noticed.
Other than that many e-mail providers are now considering all the positive and negative interactions to decide whether to mark your e-mails as SPAM or not. People who rarely open your messages, never reply to them, never click the links inside can bring your reputation down. That is why those win-back campaigns are so important. You either re-engage your subscribers or remove them from the list to avoid trouble.

Just like my other guides this one is only an “intro” to the world of e-mail marketing as there’s so much left to learn. I really hope that my job on this guide will be a perfect starting point for you.

PS: Speaking of my other guides you might want to check the “Facebook Marketing: Ultimate Guide” published at SEOmoz (Top Post of 2010 by Thumbs-Up, Traffic and ReTweets) and my recent fancy “Twitter Marketing Guide: Bigger, Longer & Uncut” published here at 1WD.

PPS: I want to say thanks to @playgrey for his work on styling this post to make it look sexy :)

As a break from the usual articles that give tips, resources, tutorials, and whatnot, why don’t we spend some time together and think of the three types of friends that helped (and are still helping) us through our chosen careers? I am certain that all of us have these people, at least two of them for now. So, are you ready?

Mentor

Everybody should have a mentor in life, not only in your trade. Someone who will share their wisdom when times are hard, someone who will teach you patience and things that you can never hope to understand alone. A mentor is someone who inspires you, someone whom you can hang out with anytime you need him/her. This can be your father, mother, godfather, boss, senior, you get the idea. Having a mentor is the best way to have your actions and thoughts kept in check.

Doing business online with people requires skills, and beginners need someone who will serve as a guide. The person whom I consider my mentor told me to pursue the things that makes me happy, as a result I’ve gained some pounds because I sit in front of my computer all day, typing and reading.

Everybody has one, it may be your middle school teacher, your college professor, or someone you met online. At one point in time you will certainly feel down, maybe because of a client who rejected all of the designs you presented, an article you submitted to a website got sent to the trash, the website you developed crashed, or even as simple as a hater’s comment on your blog post. This is when you need someone to turn to for advice, someone who has been there and survived the crash. Believe me, this is very important. As for me, I am not a great writer but I love writing. One time I was told that my writing is terrible, that I had no future in writing. Writing being one of the few things I genuinely love to do, the comment crushed my heart and I almost stopped. Good thing is I have someone who told me to “stop for a while and don’t start breaking the plates.”

Peer

Someone you consider your equal and who treats you as theirs. A fellow novice or master in your chosen craft. This is why forums and other support groups exist,so people that are on the same wavelength talk about the things they can’t tell others because, probably, others won’t understand. Having a friend who you consider to be of equal caliber is a great thing. You can spend all day talking about the last client you had, rant about the things that irk you, or even insult each other. This is actually healthy, because having a friend who is close to your age and skill (or slightly above you) is what will keep you evolving. Is it not obvious why self-obsessed people rarely make it to the top? It’s because they do not consider anyone to be above or equal to them, making things a little static.

I am a beginner when it comes to blogging, and I look up to my pals here at 1stwebdesigner. Most of the time, when I’m not procrastinating, I’m doing my best to learn from them and competing with them in a healthy way. That’s what keeps me going, someone whom I can run side by side with and talk about work and casual things. It’s not that hard, talking about private life too, since we’re almost of the same age. That is something you can’t remove in any age group, most people will always feel at ease when someone they work with is of the same age.

I’m pretty sure that everyone has friends either known personally or in the internet.

Protegé

Nothing beats having a younger friend to teach the important things in life and career to, someone you can guide along the path he/she really wants to take. Because you have been there once, you can easily guide someone who is about to follow a similar path. Plus young people have lots of wild ideas that may help you.

I am still far from this, but I am hoping that when the time comes I’ll take someone and teach him/her everything I know, be a mentor to a kid who’s just setting out.

For established writers, designers, developers, and others, I’m hoping that you have one or two beginners that you are teaching. Although I’m still far from being a mentor, I am sure that I will want to leave something behind with someone.

You’ve been there, you know what to do, make it easy (or hard) for them to do it. It is true that future generations are, most of the time, better than the previous. This is because the previous generation has taught things, things that should have been done and the should nots. Like leaving behind a living testament to what you were. It may seem grim to think that someday you’ll be gone, but isn’t it heartwarming to think that you’ve helped someone achieve their dreams even if you’ve already retired? But I’m not saying that you should take someone under your wing when you’ve retired already, you can start now, actually. So, who’d want to take me? I don’t bite.

For some this may be obvious, to others it might not, but you wouldn’t be where you are now if no one helped you somewhere along the way.

So, what is your story?

You can find trustworthy information and can filter it to avoid unwanted results by utilizing right tricks and strategies. Google search is very simple to use and by applying different techniques for search you can get better outcome of your query. Since it uses cloud computing, Google retrieves information from all over the world which can be made specific by basic search methods. Here are some tips and tricks for you which will surely help you to get great results from Google search.

a) Google Basics

In order to make your search powerful there are some basic tips that should be adopted to refine your search. Before going into detail I would like you to know that although Google shows all possible results but there are some keywords which are ignored by this search engine. These are those words which appears too frequently to be of any use like I, where, a, an, the, this, that, about etc. Some tips that I found constructive are as follows.

Tips

1. Use quotation marks and plus sign

If searching for a specific quote then use quotation marks (“”). The Google will find out the results containing accurate set of words without any change in order. You can also use a plus sign (+) immediately before the word without any space, it will provide you the same result as from quotation marks.

2. Use domain or website name

If Searching information from a specific website then use the keyword with the name of your desired website and separate them with double colon [abc: xyz.com]. You can specify domain as well like [abc: .gov] or [abc: .uk]. It will show result only from government site or in case of other domain only from sites with your required domain.

3. Use minus sign

If you want to exclude a specific word from your search results then you can use a minus sign. This will omit the word following minus sign from search results except the words where minus sign is used as a hyphen like [eye-catching]. This example will show websites containing information about eye-catching.

4. Use Asterix sign

If searching for a unclear information about a specific thing then use (*). The Google will find out all possible combination of information to the related post like [* flower].

5. Use OR operator

You can give Google a choice between two keywords by using OR operator. The Google will submit results about either of the two keywords like [world cup 2011 OR 2006]. The resulting sites will be about world cup 2006 or world 2011 whereas if you expel OR operator than the consequence will include those sites which contain the information about both.

Points to remember

• Every word you put in the search engine will be used except the words that are most used on World Wide Web.
• Punctuation marks are not included except those which have meanings like punctuation marks used in C++, C#, $45000, and so on.
• Search engine will show same results for the same word whether it is in upper case or in lower case for the fact that search engine is case insensitive.
• By default Google uses AND operator.

Strategies

Along with tips and tactics, strategies are also required to get a fruitful result. Following are some strategies for you to optimize your search.

• Keep your keywords precise.
• Be cleared about what you are searching for.
• If you are not clear about your keyword then use words that are most probable to appear on your desired web page. Do not ask questions as you are asking with a human being like [ in which country people worship cow?] instead use [ people worship cow in]
• Use appropriate words like if you are searching for ring tones don’t use word sound.
• You can also use Google shortcuts which will save your time.

b) Google Advanced Search

Besides searching a keyword using basic guidelines there are some special queries that can be used to search in an advanced form. These queries will restrict your search and prohibit you from wastage of time. These queries are very much similar to the query used to make your search specific to a country or domain. There are some smarter and advanced features of Google which will enthrall you.

1. Use destination names for flight information

If you want to book a flight you can write the names of the destinations only and Google will retrieve the flight information like [khi isb].

2. Use range instead of list of numbers

If you want a result within a range of numbers than you can write it like [12…20] instead of specifying all numbers of the range.

3. Use “filetype”

If you want to have a result only in a specific file type then write your keyword along with filetype:pdf like [airplanes filetype:pdf].

4. Use “link”

You can even found links of a webpage by using query like [link: www.1stwebdesigner.com].

5. Use “define”

If you are searching for a definition then you can refine your search by adding the word “define” with a colon like this [define: jazz]. This will give you result which holds definition of the word only.

6. Use “phone book”

If you are searching for phone number from a specific region then use phone book : like [phone book : New York].

7. Use “movie”

You can find sources related to movies only by using query like [movie : New York]. This will give you result not only about movie but also its showtimes, reviews etc.

8. Use “stocks”

If you want only stock information or finance news then write your keyword or ticker symbols along with stocks : like this [stocks : Google].

9. Use “allinanchor” and “allintitle”

If you are searching for a web page of that object which is popular for something then use [allinanchor: useful educational sites] and [allintitle : web designer ] to view a page with a title containing “web” and “designer”.

Points to remember

• By default Google operates in “moderate filtering” mode but it can be reset according to your requirement.
• You can change the preferences to “strict filtering” to prohibit Google from showing objectionable material.

Advance strategies

• Use cached version of the page to safe your time which can be wasted in the navigation of the page due to slow speed of browser.
• Bookmark pages that you use frequently so that you don’t need to do the hard work in finding the page again in future.

c) Google Search shortcuts

1. Dictionary

This shortcut will be helpful if you want to know the meaning of any word. Just type in the word followed by the word define and get results. By using this shortcut you do not need to search the whole dictionary.

2. Calculator

Google has blessed us with a Google calculator. You do not need to waste your time in searching for calculator. It works like any simple calculator, try it and make your calculations easy.

3. Public data

Now you can search public data to know population rate or unemployment rate by using this shortcut. Just type population or unemployment rate with the name of city and get the answers.

4. Time

If you are searching for time to reset your clocks then Google will let you know the time of any city of the world by this tool. Find time by writing time in the search  box with the name of the city.

5. Earth quakes

Due to high frequency of natural disasters around the world. Google has made this shortcut to provide information about earthquake and related activities from all over the world.

6. Fill in the blanks

Due to shortage of time, mostly a machine is required that replies with our less efforts. This shortcut is one contribution of Google to provide accessibility without less effort. Now you need to write only the initials of the information with a asterix sign and the Google will fill the blank itself.

7. Zip code

This is very helpful for those who works in postal services. This tool will tell you the location of the zip code. You just have to write the zip code in the search engine.

8. Unit conversion

Conversion of units are also very comfy now by Google unit conversion. Type the desired unit with the amount that you want to convert and get the converted rate.

9. Currency conversion

This is another tool by Google, using this you can convert any currency amount into desired currency you want.

10. Package tracking

This tool will help you if you want to track your package by just typing the tracking number for Fedex or USPS.

11. Mortgage rates

This tool will give you information of mortgage rate which will depends on your location. The resulted links will comprises of the websites that contains the information of the mortgage rate.

Thats all. If there is anything we missed, please feel free to tip us in comments :)

Let’s presume you’re already familiar with the basics of Twitter and your current goal is to grow your follower count. Want to learn advanced techniques?

Twitter Marketing Guide

Written by: Tim Soulo

Bigger Longer & Uncut.

Hi, my name is Tim and I’m pretty sure that you’ve landed here right from your Twitter account. Ok, you got me this time as the above claim does not apply to everyone, but I’m confident that this post is currently hot on Twitter! How do I know that while writing the very first paragraph? C’mon, it’s gonna
be a Twitter Guide – I’ll just use the tips below to make it go viral :)

Twitter Basics Part 1: Creating a Twitter Account (The Right Way)

Let’s presume you’re already familiar with
the basics of Twitter and your current goal is to grow your
follower count. Moreover you need those
dedicated followers that read your
tweets and, what’s more important,
retweet them to their own followers
making your content spread.

Just in case you’re not sure what I mean by basics, here’s a quick refresher.
 

Username: The very first dilemma that most business owners face while creating a Twitter account is whether to use a personal name or a business name. There are pros and cons with both, but I think that having brand name is mostly beneficial for big established brands as people already know them and are willing to follow.

Recently I did some consulting for a website builder company and offered them to switch from a branded account to a personal account of their founder and CEO, as people are most likely to follow an interesting person, who they expect to tweet valuable things, rather than following a ‘website builder’, which they assume will most likely tweet nothing but spam.

Your Twitter username should be unique and memorable. Remember that people will have to type it in order to mention you – don’t make them type too much.
 
Here’s an extra tip from Hubspot:

(though this does not seem to apply to @1stwebdesigner lol)

Bio: There are only 160 characters which you have to fill in to tell the Twitterverse about you, your company and/or what you’ll be tweeting about. Your Bio is used all around Twitter next to your profile picture and people READ the Bio section to decide whether to follow you or not. Anyone you follow will receive an e-mail with a recap of your profile including your Bio. Do you think they’ll be interested enough to follow you back?

My Bio is probably not the best, but I tried to make it stand out from the crowd. Best Bio practice is to briefly state who you are and what others will get if they follow you.
I often ask myself two questions before following someone:

1. Who is that person?
2. How can they be useful to me?

Some people go really far with this incentive tip and use their Bio to suggest a Free E-Book to each new follower, but this sounds kind of desperate to me.
 
Image: People on Twitter mostly use a personal photo as their avatar. I think this is because Twitter is a powerful personal branding tool and you might want your followers to recognize you.
 
My vote goes for consistency – if there’s a non-photo avatar that you use around the web (forums, comments, guest posts), I think you should use it on Twitter too so that people who have seen your avatar around the web recognize you.

Web Link: Why would you miss an opportunity to promote your website in your Twitter profile? And, besides, here’s what Hubspot says about the impact of the web link on your follower count:

Background: You can easily create a customized Twitter background, but is it worth your time and efforts? First of all your Twitter account will become more attractive – but that’s pretty obvious, right? What’s not that obvious is that with a well designed background you have a chance of appearing in one of those numerous Twitter background showcases. Thousands of people will see your creative profileand they might become your new followers.

Twitter Basics Part 2: Following the Right People

Now, that your Twitter profile is complete and following all the best practices, it’s time to follow some people. Following the ‘right people” will not only keep you up to date with all the latest news in your niche and help you to network, but it will also affect the way Twitter uses your profile in its recommendation engine. Every time you follow someone, you are being associated with them in some way. With the automatic recommendation engine Twitter uses, I have to assume you’d prefer to be associated with people who you share something in common with. It might be the place you live, the field you work in, or a circle of mutual friends and acquaintances.

Follow the people you know: this is the number one tip. You might be reading some blogs or websites on the topic that you are interested in. Most of the authors mention their Twitter profile at the end of the post. Follow them as they might tweet lots of cool stuff.

Twitter Search: Each term you search on Twitter is now being split into four independent searches: Tweets, Tweets with links, Tweets near you and people. There’s even more than that – check this awesome guide by SEJ to become a Twitter search ninja.

Twitter lists: Twitter List is Twitter’s way of allowing users to group profiles (and their tweets) together – you can check the lists that people you follow are listed in. You can also check if you are being listed and see who you are being listed with.
 
Twitter Directories: There are places where Twitter accounts are neatly organized and categorized. To name a few: Listorious, WeFollow, JustTweetIt, TweetFind. Browse them and I’m sure you’ll find some interesting people to follow. By the way, why not add yourself there?
 
Custom lists: Bloggers always used to create lists: “10 Best Books on Marketing”, “20 Coolest Design Blogs”, “15 Social Bookmarking Sites” – you all know that sort of stuff. The new trend is top people in each industry to follow on Twitter: designers, bloggers, marketers, seo experts, social media gurus and so on. Do a couple of Google searches for those lists as they may suggest some really cool people to follow. If you can’t find a list on your niche, you should definitely create one and maybe you’ll get some new followers just for being an author of that list.
 
Online Tools: There is an enormous amount of Twitter tools to help you find and manage followers. I don’t want to promote any of them, so just try them all to see which one works best for you.

(Twitterverse by Brian Solis and JESS3)
 
Play around: As I’ve said before, Twitter has an awesome recommendation engine, so once you start playing around with Twitter you’ll get lots of recommendations. Definitely check out the powerful “Who To Follow” tool, which speaks for itself.

Advanced Twitter Tactics Part 1: Getting More Followers

I want you to check out an excellent study by Ian Lurie on the quality of Twitter followers. He started collecting data after some spammy guy who had 32,000 followers retweeted one of his posts. You might expect that a retweet by a person with such a huge following will grant your URL lots of clicks and further retweets. Well, what Ian got was only three clicks.

I won’t tell you the rest of the story, for it is too cool to be rewritten. Twitter power is not about the quantity of your followers, but about the quality of your, and your followers, content. In this part of my guide I will teach you how to gain quality followers.
 
Think: Yeah, that is my first tip. But I think it’s the most powerful one. Think of the way YOU follow new people and think how many of them eventually stay in your Twitter feed. Then do the same stuff that they did to get followed by you. If you ask me I mostly follow people who blog. When I see a smart post, I will do my best to find the author on Twitter, follow him and perhaps even communicate a bit. The second way I may follow people is when they @-mention me in their tweet. I will usually check the profile of that person and if it appeals to me – I’ll follow them.
 
Follow to get followers: This is the best known tactic to grow your follower count and it’s based on the newest psychological disorder called ISFBaG (I Should Follow Back Guilt). When you follow someone, they receive an e-mail notification and may follow you back. You can mass-follow people via Twitter interface, use some online tools or even create scripts, which will auto follow people, who tweet specific keywords.

Another study by Hubspot shows that your following to followers ratio dramatically affects your chances to get a follow back. So ideally you need to keep the number of people you follow lower than the number of your followers – this way you are more likely to get a follow back.

People might think that having a large number of followers will add credibility to their account. Well from now on they won’t be able to trick you! It’s easy to measure the credibility of a Twitter account by comparing the number of followers to the number of the lists.
 
Rand from SEOmoz has one listing per 7.6 followers ( 24,368 followers / 3,187 lists = 7.6).
If the ratio is more than 10 – that’s a signal that a person is a spammer who does a lot of mass-following.

Run a contest: People love contests, freebies – such events always attracts great attention. Classical contests go well on social networks, but if you can think of some extremely unique event, it may do wonders to your social presence. There is an interesting story, I would like to share (little NSFW) how Dutch porn star attracted a lot of people to follow her! She got around 15,000 followers within a couple of days since that claim, but you should think twice before running a contest like that. :)

Know who is sharing your content: Once you publish some content online try to track who is tweeting about it. You already know that those people appreciate your work, so it’s usually a matter of a “thank you” message to get a follow back from them.
 
Promote your Twitter account: That’s probably the most popular and most obvious advice, so I’ve left till last. Use your Twitter account URL everywhere you can: e-mail signatures, social media profiles, forum signatures, blog comments, business cards etc. There’s no rocket science here, just use every opportunity you can to share your Twitter account.

Advanced Twitter Tactics Part 2: Building Relations

It’s cool to have a couple thousand followers, but do they care about you after all? You might have followed my tips to gain quality followers, but still it does not mean that they will interact with you and help you to spread your content. What you need is to build relationships with them so that they know who you are and read your updates.

Reward your followers: You can do that with a follow back or, alternatively, you can just thank them for following you in a reply or direct message. Just don’t spam everyone with those automatic Direct Messages which no one cares about. Try sending a personalized message with some information that the recipient may be interested in.

Retweet others: People on Twitter usually keep an eye on their retweets. So try retweeting someone else’s tweet and add a personal comment to it – this is a great way to get noticed and start communicating with people that you follow, and your own followers.
 
Public mentions: #FollowFriday or #ff is a nice occasion to show your appreciation to someone by publicly mentioning their account and providing a reason for others to follow them. However there is no need to wait till Friday to do that.
 
Twitter lists: When you add someone to a Twitter list, they won’t be notified about it, but they may find it out on their own sooner or later. Make respectful Twitter list names to show some appreciation to people you list there. I am really happy each time someone adds me to a marketing related list. (this was a call-to-action :) )
By following other people’s Twitter lists you can get some attention too, as people might check who else is following their lists.
 
Twitter list Ninja Tip #1: follow @listwatcher as it will send you a DM each time someone adds, removes you from their list, or changes their list. Being listed is a reason to get in touch and say thank you, ( or something else, if you were removed :) )
Twitter list Ninja Tip #2: learn how to automate your lists with Formulists online service.
 
Follow people who @mention you: This is a great way to show your appreciation for being mentioned and, besides, this will make a person to take a closer look at your profile and what you tweet about.
 
Twitter Favourites: Currently this feature is not widely used, but I think it can be considered as a form of appreciation too. Each tweet that you add to your Twitter favourites is saved in your profile under the “Favourites” tab. I doubt that the author of a tweet will ever see that, but others might find your favourites feed useful and that can be another reason to follow you.
 
TweetChats: It’s a regularly scheduled online event which is perfect for networking. For instance you can check #seochat – this is a search marketing chat which is held every week. If you fail to find a TweetChat on your topic, maybe you should launch one yourself.

Twitter Ninja Part 1: Getting Retweets

Eventually, the aim of every single tweet is to be noticed and get retweeted by others. If you think that your tweets get enough engagement, try measuring the CTR (Click Through Rate) of every link you tweet. This can be easily done with Bit.ly URL shortening service, just add a + at the end of any short URL and you’ll see the stats. In most cases you’ll notice that the engagement not as good as expected. So what can you do to improve it? Lets see…

Tweet metrics: Almost everything can be measured, including tweets. In his great study Rand Fishkin tried to calculate and improve the CTR of his tweets. This resulted in a few takeaways:
 

• * the average CTR of a tweet is about 1.17% of the followers number;
• * shorter tweets get a higher CTR;
• * tweets on a topic that people expect from you get a higher CTR.

Ask for a retweet: A study by Dan Zarrella shows that you can easily increase your ReTweetability by simply asking your followers for a retweet. Only five letters can make a change – “PLS RT”

What to tweet: You already know that tweets on topics that people expect from you get a higher CTR. In addition to that, another study by Dan Zarrella reveals the fact that tweets about Twitter perform really well. (Remember I promised this post would be HOT on Twitter? :))
 
You can also use various bookmarking and news services to discover what’s hot and trending and tweet about it: StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, TweetMeme.

When to tweet: There are lots of statistics on this one which show different numbers, but in general the best time to get retweets in the US is 4 PM and the best day is Friday. So try to stick to these when scheduling your most important tweets.

Twitter Ninja Part 2: Miscellaneous Tips

Leverage your website: In case you have a website or blog, why not to use it to promote your Twitter account a bit? WordPress users can check this awesome selection of Twitter plugins and the rest can get inspired by the showcase of how people embed their twitter feed into their website design.
 
Use Hashtags: This feature is used to unite Tweets around a particular topic. I understand hashtags as a search tool. Instead of searching on Tweeter for “social media marketing” you can simply do a search for #smm or just click on a hashtag whenever you see it in someone’s tweet. This will list all the tweets that have a particular hashtag in it. So every time you add a hashtag to your tweet, it increases its chances to be found by random people.
 
Track Google SERP: You can easily get a daily Direct Message of your websites Google position using a twitter bot by TweetedRanks (free tool).
 
Get your website pages indexed faster: A recent experiment concluded that a tweet which gets 3 retweets or more will help in increasing the time and rate at which the tweeted page gets indexed.
 
HootSuite Hootlet: I must confess that HootSuite is a tool that dramatically improved my tweeting experience. Specifically I am obsessed with their bookmarklet tool. You just drag it to your bookmarks and when you want to share the post on Twitter you just click the bookmarklet and the message window pops up. What’s more important, you can schedule your tweets right from this Hootlet window. This is the best Twitter tool I’ve ever used.

This is it! The end of my Twitter Marketing guide, but definitely not the end of the creative ideas and ways to use Twitter to market yourself, your content, your company or your products.

I hope you all enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to reading your comments. And don’t forget that you can follow me (@timsoulo) on Twitter.

If you can relate with anything I’ve written above, then this article will be a great time and life saver for you! I’ll explain several ways to launch a new website for free or extremely cheap! Quality doesn’t need to suffer because you don’t have a few thousand dollars to spend on unique website design coding or extremely cool features. If you’re going to launch a new start-up – it’s always smart to start small, start with just core functions to see how people respond to your creation! Once you see they enjoy it and there is a market, then you can consider seriously investing  some money on improving your site. It doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of money when just you’re just starting out.

With my advice you will be able to create a new website really fast! If you have a great idea you don’t want to have to spend hours working on it before you get to test it in action! Website creation doesn’t need to be a confusing and time consuming process! The main thing is to get your idea out there! Let’s get started!

In this article we’ll focus on:

1. Basic solutions to launch small projects online for free or really cheap.
2. Slightly more advanced solutions for entrepreneurs who want to test their new idea fully while spending only a little money on it.

Free Solutions Versus Paid Ones

There’s always certain advantages and disadvantages in everything we do or use, this principle applies to website creation as well. Free options aren’t always bad and paid options aren’t always better. You just have to know what strings to pull to find the best deals on the internet. Well, you won’t need to pull any strings here, because I will share with you the most effective solutions.

Advantages of Free Solutions

Image via CrunchBase

Well, if you are on a tight budget (or even better – no budget, just a dream)  you can always count on resources that are offered for free by their creators. There are resources out there that are premium-like in quality but are free. Why free? Don’t they want to see dollars on their bank accounts? Of course they do, but the thing about giving away free softwares, logos, themes and other deliverables is pure marketing to grab attention and gain exposure.  We can seriously benefit from such freebies too regularly searching for premium free resources.

For example, I rarely buy any icons, because there are so many free ones – take FindIcons, IconFinder websites for example.

Disadvantages

There are many free resources available but with most of them you’re either going to sacrifice quality, aesthetics and with themes/templates you cannot be sure if  code is well written. If you’re getting something for free, you often cannot expect to receive good support and you cannot expect to receive the highest quality. There’s a quote that goes “if you are good at something, don’t do it for free,” and you guessed it! Beginners and intermediate designers/developers quite often provide free resources because they’re not at the level yet where they can sell everything they design or develop. The good thing about this system is that though they may not make money they build their reputation and potential customer base by providing quality resources for free.

To summarize – yes, there are a lot of amazing free solutions available and some are high quality. While free is good – you can run into problems such as overuse(everyone using the same trendy free pack of social media icons), no brand recognition, looking cheap because without the necessary knowledge you may not use resources as they are intended to be used. My opinion here is that you can surely use free graphic design resources because what you see is what you get! However you should be careful picking up free themes and templates because often they aren’t very well documented or supported and you may encounter unexpected problems as bugs, compatibility issues with different plugins or modifications you will want to do.

I still consider free solutions to be a pretty good starting point if you don’t want (or can’t) spend any money on it. To explore more about free resources and their pros and cons, read this excellent article by Jared – Can Free Design Resources Be Exemplary?

Zilch Experience in Web Dev?

For people who are not into development but want to have a website for a business or for personal use there are many options to choose from, both free and paid. Free themes, free hosting, and free anything has its downsides and would not work for a blog like 1WD or for e-commerce. Good thing the citizens of the information age, and of the internet, are good enough to offer a free taste which can work for both people who have the skill to develop a website and for people with zero experience with such.

Now, there are tons of free services out there which offer good things, but here I will focus on things that I have used firsthand.

The first thing to ask yourself is…what is this site going to be for? What’s your goal? – personal diary, portfolio site, just a fun project, serious blogging project, startup, website to support your application or software you have, forum, e-commerce site? You need to set clear goals at first!

Basic free solutions for beginners : Hosted Websites

This solution is very good if your goal is just to have some internet presence, have a personal diary or you want to build a small community for friends, work colleagues or maybe just a fan club. However I will list the advantages and disadvantages of this solution, because I really do not recommend it if you have any plans to expand. You’ll understand what I mean once you’ve read pros and cons:

Advantages

• Well, it’s free or super cheap!
• Updated automatically – no maintenance issues at all! You don’t have to worry about updates and any compatibility issues
• Free hosting – you don’t have to worry about your site being online, you don’t have to solve any technical issues
• Easy to setup and launch – it will take just a few minutes for you to launch such website, no previous experience needed!
• Search engine friendly – many marketers use those free website solutions to promote their main site! Why? Because usually those big blog platforms have excellent rankings in search engines, you can get ranked extremely fast because of that.

Disadvantages

• Little control over configuration, design and customization – your chances to pick appropriate templates are limited, you can use only a few supported plugins. It’s hard to build/design something that stands out from the crowd there.
• Very hard to monetize – Well, these sites will be monetized, but not by you! It will be monetized by those big companies who own the site, because they need to cover their own expenses. Basically you’re paying them in both cases – you pay them cash or they earn some cash with ads.
  

  Image via CrunchBase

• No branding- many hosted websites will look the same. Your  website will also look cheap because of the ads the hosted website platform will implement automatically.
• Limited resources – while hosting may be free, many platforms have limitations for bandwidth and space usage. You won’t encounter these problems early on
• You don’t own the content – this is the most serious one – if one day the site decides to stop working and they change their policies, you could lose your content and it’s usually difficult to transfer to your own website later on.

Ok, now you know some of the things you may deal with if you choose this option!

For hosted blogging platforms I recommend you choose from Posterious, WordPress, Tumblr.

There is also a very interesting Flash website creation solution I encountered some time ago so I am going to talk about it a bit too, because it’s great for beginner users:

Flash or Not?

To help you decide, first you need to know the purpose of your website. Is the purpose to have an online portfolio so that employers and potential clients will see you and be impressed? If  that’s the case, I believe that a flash website is a good choice because it provides flexibility when it comes to creativity. If the goal is to start an online store or a blog it would be best to go for a more dynamic solution, one of my recommendations above may be better suited to your needs.

Flash Website (Wix)

The good thing about having a flash website is the creative freedom. Colors, effects, and animation is not a problem. A Flash-based website will save you the trouble of learning jQuery and other languages/scripts for added effects. Here’s the rub, if you have a slow internet connection like mine you won’t fully enjoy the website. Opening a light-weight flash website on my end takes up to 30 to 50 seconds. Not fun at all.

There is a free flash website builder, which allows people without any knowledge of programming and designing to come up with a new website via drag and drop. Wait, drag and drop? Yes, that easy. Wix allows its users to create a flash-based website using a very simple process. Trust me when I say that the registration process only took me 5 seconds and I’m good to go with my website. Alright, I’m dropping it now, it’s free. But if you are the meticulous type and serious about it you can always upgrade and have your own domain name.

With Wix you get to choose from a wide selection of free layouts and edit them at your whim. Literally drag and drop, you can manage information with just a few clicks.

See their gallery for a full list of what you can do with Wix.

Quality

The quality of the design is amazing, with its wide selection of layouts you can’t help but notice the high quality while most are free to use. Many of the design elements are drag and drop, no programming or designing skills needed.

Drag and Drop

This eliminates the need to code and design, all you have to do is choose, drag, and drop. Very user friendly. Menus are easy to understand, you won’t get confused trying to figure out what things do. Anything that you can see is clickable and editable, no worries if you don’t like the color, it only takes a few seconds and clicks to change it to suit your taste!

Below is a screenshot of how layouts are edited.

Wix is best for people who are on a budget but need to be online. Best for portfolios and personal websites. As mentioned, there’s an option to upgrade your plan from free to premium where you will get your own domain and other features that you will love. I like this approach because you can easily switch and see benefits immediately  (no ads, own domain, hosting, support, analytics and so on).

Wix Sample Websites

Remember, you can build your website via drag and drop using Wix, no programming required!

I don’t want a flash website! What else?

Up to now I really do not know what to call it: standard website, traditional website, HTML website, etc.. Whatever, what’s important is that you know what I mean: not flash.

During my free time I am developing a website, although I’m not that good at coding. My real problem? My design skills are terrible. Free solution? Minimalist design. I’m not saying that minimalism is easy, I’m pretty sure I’d still be troubled by it. If only I had the money I’d buy something from ThemeForest or hire a designer friend.

“I have a design but I can’t code”

Relax! There is a great solution for that. If you have a design (in generally accepted image format) and you want it coded in 48 hours one thing comes to mind: Code My Concept. Although it does not come cheap, at least you are assured that your design will be hand coded in valid HTML and CSS within 48 hours. Saves you the time and effort, and it’s professionally done too.

An alternative is Code Canyon where you can literally purchase scripts. Just like Theme Forest, rest assured that the codes and scripts delivered there are properly moderated and are of high quality. All for a fair price.

Some of the things you can buy:

Many people have trust issues when it comes to these type of things, 1stwebdesigner is willing to help you find a designer or a coder among our 24,000 plus followers on Twitter. We can tweet your needs if you need it, how does that sound?

Shopping for code and plugins is very easy, very helpful too if you are on a tight budget, or time won’t allow you to hire a developer in time or it’s not within budget. Think of it like building your own computer, buying parts that will complete the whole. That’s how it works.

“I know how to code but I can’t design well”

Aside from Theme Forest where you can purchase web templates, there is Graphic River where you can choose from a wide selection of stock graphics ranging from simple icons to a sophisticated prints.

A free solution would be free stock photo sites like sxc.hu or a site like Deviant Art but you can’t expect to find specific web elements to add on your website.

Here are some free things that you can use to build your design:

• 45 Free Design Templates and PSD Files
• 57+ Free Image Gallery, Slideshow And Lightbox Solutions
• 38 jQuery And CSS Drop Down Multi Level Menu Solutions

Create Your Own Domain Name

Choosing the right domain name is crucial task, because you’ll build your whole branding around it. There is a problem though, it’s very hard to get a good .com domain which is still free. Actually there is a serious problem in getting any good domain names at all! To help you through this process I suggest you try this nifty website – Domainr. It’s a site to bookmark, that’s for sure!

Well, I also suggest you use the site GoDaddy to register your domain. You can get domains really cheap from as low as  7.49$ per year! They also have a pretty good suggestion system to find related domains if the name you really wanted is taken already. Their backend system may seem confusing at first, but I’ve had positive experiences with this site, so I can really recommend it.

Choosing a Web Host

Catchy “Unlimited” bandwidth and disk space, several hosting services offer monthly payments from $4 to $10 for shared hosting. What does it mean?

In truth there is no such thing as Unlimited disk space and Unlimited bandwidth, the service provider assumes that you won’t use too much (which is true most of the time) so they use the word to their leverage. Is it any good? It depends on how you will use it, of course. For a personal website or an online portfolio it is more than okay if you want your own domain. I use GoDaddy and so far I have not experienced any problems, except for the fact that their control panel is a huge mess. Hostgator is one of the cheapest and good hosting services too. Both start from $4 (as of writing this) for shared hosting and both offer VPS. Dreamhost’s record is near flawless, you can google up “Dreamhost reviews” and use your instincts to see if the review is a sham or not. I know three people who use Dreamhost and they say it’s flawless, of ourse it does not come cheap.

1stwebdesigner is hosted by Eleven2. Is it any good? It speaks for itself. 1WD receives hundreds of thousands of visitors a month and it’s still doing fine. If your website will have great traffic in the future you may want to start with a good host to avoid the hassle of transferring to a new host when everything is in motion. You don’t want to lose even 30 minutes of uptime.

If your goal, on the other hand, entails great traffic and thousands of users every day you might want to opt for a Full-featured hosting. For a couple of months now I have seen many people cuss about their hosting services because of hours of downtime on their blogs. Probing deeper I learned that most use shared hosting. In my opinion you can’t trust shared hosting when it comes to big businesses online. A solution would be to shift from shared hosting to full-featured hosting.

Quick Review:

Hosted Website Solutions

• For hosted blogging platforms I recommend you to choose from Posterious, WordPress, Tumblr;
• Easy site builder for a flash website you can use Wix;

Website Design

• Theme Forest offers high quality,unique and very affordable themes.

Code Shopping

• You can shop for codes at Code Canyon
• You can go to Code My Concept for PSD to HTML conversion

Hosting And domains

• GoDaddy -register domains with ease.
• Eleven2 Hosting – great hosting 1WD uses for a year already!

Related articles

• 45 Top and Most Popular Articles of 2010 in Design Community (1stwebdesigner.com)
• 8 Easy Solutions to Create Question & Answer Websites (1stwebdesigner.com)
• Options to Consider When Looking for Stock Photos: Free vs Paid Solutions (1stwebdesigner.com)

In this article I wanted to scratch the surface about several well known, and not so well known, monetization techniques that you could implement in your own business. Even if you don’t have your own business blog yet – no problem, because even a simple understanding  how other people earn online will be a great help to boost your confidence to start! Yes, online business can be very profitable if you follow certain rules to monetize your site!

I consider there are three categories of people venturing online:

1.Dreamers

Most people just complain about their life and keep reading success stories but don’t do anything on their own! Remember that dreaming will not make your goals a reality! These people may earn some money to survive, but nothing impressive, they’re just afraid or too lazy to actually start something. If you are there – don’t worry, you are stepping out from that reality to discover a new reality! This is how I started, because I didn’t want to accept the reality everybody else had! What’s the Secret?  - Take action!

2. Average business (making a living)

Here I would rank fairly successful people, including freelancers who own blog businesses and share their thoughts and expertise to their established readership (50,000-100,000 unique visits per month). Most online businesses fall in this category, because the actual project idea is good, but there is something missing. Mostly it’s because such business owners are just hard working and have experienced in their own niche – be it design, web development, writing, but not so much in marketing, social media promotion or money management. They are just lacking motivation or expertise in some areas that are crucial for their business to grow. They probably don’t have enough money to hire people who could take on the tasks required to market a blog and take it to the next level. Most freelancers don’t have enough time to learn these new skills because they are doing everything themselves.

My answer to fix this – implement better monetizing techniques to earn more (the old saying goes ‘work smarter, not harder’) so you can afford to hire someone that has the knowledge and skills you may not! Another solution could be to change the vision – maybe you’re doing what everybody else is. Are you doing anything different, or unique,to grab more people’s attention?

3.Good, profitable business (enjoy living)

And then there is  the third category where the business seems to have everything it needs – established team, great content, social media promotion, marketing and some classic monetization techniques implemented. Most people do not make it to this level of success and those that do often stop here because they don’t know how else to improve! I myself face this challenge and I’m slowly moving forward and making improvements. I was at this stage for close to a year and I considered myself highly successful. I was comfortable, and because I felt successful I didn’t actively seek ways to improve.  I paid for this mistake – I lost a lot of loyal readers, who just saw the content wasn’t at the same level anymore.

My point?

Well, there are so many online businesses, but most of them are missing great monetization! Project ideas are great, but you need to show how the idea can make the money; what will make this new business profitable!  Ok, everybody can make money from Google Adsense, selling image banners, but this type of monetization is limited (rare exceptions)! You need to get more and more traffic to keep your income growing and that’s the problem because there are some limits in traffic growth.  For example 1WD was growing rapidly for 2 years, but then growth became much slower and when my income stayed the same for several months I started to worry!

How can I grow my business, if I cannot increase the income? All I can do is invest my money more carefully, but opportunities are very limited! Oh, and I didn’t mention that once your blog is huge you cannot increase your ad prices that much, because nobody will usually buy those ads (there are a few exceptions to this, namely the major blogs that are considerd the top of their respective niches).

How do you increase income then? Well..here are some other monetization techniques. There are a lot smarter ways to make money (like I said earlier, work smarter, not harder). I’m going to share with you some different techniques and options, explain how they work and can help you make the most of your blog.  This Bullet Proof guide will show you how to make money from your design blog! These tips were written specifically for design blogs, though the principles and methods can be applied to any blog.

Image Banner Advertising

Advertising, no doubt, is the most popular and classic way to earn money with a design blog. You can see a couple of banners on almost every design blog. Selling banner space is one of the main ways many blogs earn an income (they’re still the top income source for 1WD). BuySellAds is the top choice for blogs who want to sell their unutilized space. It simplifies the process of buying and selling advertisements so you don’t have to attract advertisers yourself. Instead you can just focus on the blog’s content and let BuySellAds do the work for you. However the biggest drawback is that BSA take 25% of your profit. Of course you can try to sell advertising space on your own, though it can be really frustrating and time consuming, so the majority of blogs use BSA.

Well, there are a couple of good alternatives though:

DeckNetwork

The premier network for reaching creative, web and design professionals, The Deck serves up over one hundred million ad impressions each month and is uniquely configured to connect the right marketers to a targeted, influential audience.

What makes this ad service stand out from the crowd is they accept only top design sites, ensuring that traffic is very targeted for advertisers. They also only accept high quality advertisers who are selling good products, not just any old thing. The downside in my opinion, is that if you want to use their service, you cannot use other monetizing options, for example: Google Adsense.

CarbonAds

Carbon Ads is an ad tech company behind a new kind of advertising network. Carbon connects advertisers to highly-relevant users through targeted verticals we call Circles. These circles are made up of influential publishers who lead, or are actively engaged with, their industries. To their audiences, Carbon brings well-designed, value-focused ads, displayed one per page above the fold, for quality brands, products and services that readers actually need and want.

Another promising new ad network is FuelBrandInc – very relevant for designers.

Affiliate Programs

If your blog generates a lot of traffic you should really consider affiliates as a serious source of income. If you’re not familiar with affiliate marketing –  it’s the type of advertising where you, for example, with your blog send potential buyers to a direct merchant. If done right it can be a win-win situation for both you and your audience.

ClickBank

Clickbank is one of the most popular affiliate networks which we use here at 1stwebdesigner because they offer the biggest payouts if you sell something. It’s not easy to convert visitors to actual buyers, but this is the best place to start. There are also good alternatives: CJ, which is very similar to Clickbank. Basically these two networks are the biggest ones and you’ll find the greatest variety of products, some of which could be really appropriate for your site.

Why to choose Clickbank:

• Commissions of up to 75% — much higher than other affiliate networks
• Digital products mean instant delivery and faster commissions
• More reward for your efforts
• Tens of thousands of products

Envato Marketplaces

Well, at least for our site, the Envato marketplace referral programs have worked really great. Why? Because their marketplaces are extremely relevant to our site – for themes we use Themeforest, for design elements we use GraphicRiver, for code snippets we use CodeCanyon sites!

I definitely suggest you check out the Envato markeplace referral program to get started easily. In my experience the image banners from the marketplace don’t work very well. Don’t over optimize articles, but it doesn’t hurt to add few premium selections for example to big slideshow gallery article. The reason people actually go to these marketplaces is because the products offered there are extremely high quality, something worth paying for! In my opinion, free isn’t always the best option and if I find something that can greatly save me hours of work for only $10-30, I will buy it without hesitating! Learn more here:  Envato Wiki site.

Another alternative is Mojo-Themes, which is kind of similar to Themeforest selling premium themes and templates.

Amazon Associates Program

Well, I haven’t earned millions there, because at least 1stwebdesigner isn’t focused so much on hardware and physical products. I would suggest if you’re in the design niche to seriously consider promoting popular design books, bestsellers on Amazon from time to time. While such promotions won’t make you a lot of money, it definitely doesn’t hurt to keep an eye on Amazon’s products.

Amazon is different because they offer very little, only 4% as a referral fee at the beginning, if you sell enough products in a month you could maker 6% or higher. What’s cool with Amazon is that though your referrals may not end up buying what they saw on you site, they may end up buying something completely different, and you’ll still make some money. The main task here is actually just to get people to go to Amazon, and they’ll do the rest! There are several ways to make money with Amazon, learn more here.

Other Monetizing Techniques

Premium Content: Memberships

Premium content is another great way for design blogs to earn some money. You can see many design blogs offering high quality content and tutorials for money. This is a great and effective way to make money if you’re able to deliver high quality content regularly. Nowadays when you can find almost anything on the internet, people are not willing to pay for mediocre content or content they’ve seen in ten different places. You have to be able to provide unique and high quality content so that people will be willing to pay for it. In most of the blogs you can access all their premium content for a fixed monthly fee. Check out Tuts+ and WDL premium programs to see what I mean and what kind of content people are paying for.

Tuts+ makes most if its money from their membership program, not advertising, not referral programs, but their membership program!

Selling Premium File Memberships

A similar way of earning money to what we just talked about.

Similar to blog premium membership, there are websites in which you can get access to high quality design resources for a fixed monthly fee. Some of the best examples are WeGraphics and MediaLoot. WeGraphics also has an affiliate program so you can earn some extra cash if you refer new people to their site. As you can see these websites are very specialized,but that doesn’t mean you can’t establish something similar on your own design blog.

Selling Books, Themes & Other Premium Products

Another popular way to earn money is by selling themes, icons, e-books and other design related material. It’s similar to the premium membership model, but the difference is that with this method you sell one specific thing for a one fixed price.

Smashing Shop is a great example how to make money online by selling e-books. If you have the time and knowledge to create a magnificent product, this can be very profitable.

You can learn a lot from them about how to go about selling a printed book. SM just released their new ‘Smashing Book #2′ and it has sold extremely well which proves that this approach can be profitable.

WP Plugins is a revolutionary WordPress project, aimed at improving the quality, support for, and standard of plugins. They’re just like the App Store for the iPhone, except for WordPress. They assess, check and scrutinize every plugin to ensure that you get the highest quality product.

Elegantthemes is a small marketplace selling premium WordPress themes. They differ from similar marketplaces is that here you get unlimited access to all of their themes for a fixed price. You’re not just purchasing a specific file once, you are obtaining access to a strong and healthy community, frequent theme updates as well as full access to the support services.

IconEden is a premium icon marketplace which helps you save time by offering well-designed stock icons for your projects. They’re one of the best in icon creation and with stock icons picked from IconEden, you’ll never worry about the consistency, usability or simplicity. You can buy the icon sets separately or you can access all icon bundles for a single payment.

Case Study:PremiumPixels

I wanted to show you the site for someone who ties his design blog to his marketplace at Themeforest. Orman Clark offers premium free PSD files on his personal site almost twice a week – visitors love him for that and keep coming back. But how does he make money offering things for free?

He also owns very successful Themeforest account, where he regularly offers new and high quality WordPress themes for sale! And his work is really amazing, definitely worth buying. He is marketing himself and his products very well by cross-promoting his premium themes through his blog in a non-obtrusive way (which I love). He doesn’t trick people into buying his themes, just reminds them about his premium themes on his sidebar and right before you download any of his free psd files! PremiumPixels is great case study for graphic designers and developers who want to make their living doing what they really love the most!

Job Boards

Job boards are a great way to earn some extra cash and increase your traffic as well. They can also be very useful for your readers, but the trick is you need to have a good user base before you think about creating your own job board, otherwise no one will use it and you’ll just get an extra headache and make no money. Before you start,  investigate what others in your niche are doing right and most importantly – what they are doing wrong! If you have a chance to create a better job board then you might become successful without a huge blog presence, but in most cases I still would suggest to have a good reader base first.

Where do you earn money from job boards? Well, you can charge people for placing their job advertisements on your job board or vice versa, you can collect money from job seekers. Once you’ve built an effective and trustworthy job board, the ads will come naturally and it will turn into a great source of passive income. Not as easy to do as it sounds though.

Resource Bundles

Bundles are becoming more and more popular nowadays. Design bundles are premium resource packs which usually contain various apps, themes, icons, e-books and premium memberships for a price that can be as low as 10% of the bundle’s real value. BundleHunt is the most popular service offering bundles they call “treasures”. If you check out their About section, you’d see that some well-known design blogs (WebDesignerDepot, for instance) are contributing to this project.

Where is the money? Well, you may be able to sell your product as a part of a bundle. If you have something in one of these bundles, the irresistible price of the bundle and the quality of your product may drive a significant amount of traffic to your site, which may result in higher sales of other products you offer. If nothing else, at the very least you’ll be known by a much wider audience. Some bundles offer an affiliate program if you post a great article about the bundle.

MightyDeals

MightyDeals offer unbelievable deals and discounts for creative professionals for a very limited time. The deals include products and services that are heavily discounted, usually 50% to 90% off.

I like their marketing technique, how they cross-promote their deals through many popular design blogs by placing advertisements in unique spots, which get really good attention because of their placement.

BundleHunt

Bundlehunt is owned by a bunch of developers, marketers and social media experts who, once in a while, like to put together bundles of high quality software, aimed at empowering the creative community. Because we are fond of our bundles, they call them “treasures.” Some call them “premium resource packs”. Maybe because it is a premiere service within the design community offering outstanding apps, templates, icons, eBooks, hosting plans and premium memberships for usually less than 10% of it’s real price.

Well I must say their deals are impressive and this kind of thing can be done by anybody! Well, there is a trick – you need to know the right people and get those people and companies to trust you to actually get these deals.

Do you want to know where this bundle idea started? It started with Groupon just a few years ago. Groupon’s founder just figured if companies can unite to buy something for lower price…why not use this same idea for individuals? It’s a win/win situation!

Email Newsletter

Every blog and business should have its own email newsletter and contact list! Why? Because email marketing is the most immediate way to promote your products, resources or new sites! Before you start promoting anything you of course need to provide value and build trust, but once it’s done – possibilities are limitless! Those bundle sites actually rely a lot on their email marketing, where they promote their latest releases to people who actually are interested in their deals!

Build an active list of at least 500 people and you have a very targeted and profitable business! I am just explaining the basics here though, there are a lot of hidden techniques how to make income from email marketing, how to do super successful product launches with an email list alone! Some successful examples are the SmashingMagazine Newsletter and actually 1WD is also working on building a list by offering free e-book and a seven day email course to encourage people to subscribe!

When you sign up to Graphic Design Blender’s newsletter you get access to a free ebook.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve got a little insight about how to make money with your blog. These techniques can not only make you some money, they can also increase your traffic and attract new visitors. Try not to overdo it with monetization; don’t forget about your blog’s primary goals. Relevant, high quality content is what will draw people to your site and keep them coming back, if you have the content and the readership, the money will come.

Well, if you enjoyed this article, let us know because it only scratched the surface of how some people make money on the Internet! If there is enough interest and demand I am considering doing some case studies and interviewing successful designers and developers who have turned their hobby a full time business!

Do you want more case studies? Do you want detailed guides:

• how to set up your job board?
• how to approach companies to get good deals from them?
• how to build relationships?

Let us know, I would be happy to show you how to have a rewarding and successful future! I have been passionately researching and trying many different ways to monetize 1WD and I have very good relationships with some of the biggest and most successful design blogs – I believe I can teach you something and I would be happy to teach you (and learn a few things myself, no doubt) by doing case studies and interviews with successful people!

Here is a beginner’s guide to help you start your own career on the web. Socialize. Be connected. Be friends. Be known. Have fun!

1. Create your account

Just go to Twitter.com and click the Sign Up button.

You will be asked to fill out little details about you. Type in your Full Name (I suggest that you put your real name. This way people who know you will easily find your profile.), a username, a password and a valid email address. You can check and uncheck the checkbox if you want your friends to find you by your email address. Read the terms of service and click the Create my account button.

There will be an image verification that you need to type to make sure that you are a real human. Then click Finish.

Wait for a second and check your registered email address to confirm  your twitter account. You will be given a link to confirm your account to have a full access to Twitter and full notifications will be sent to the email address so you will be updated.

That’s it you have your twitter account.

2. Set up your Settings

In your twitter page, go to the upper left panel. You will see your username with a drop down menu. Click Settings to modify a more personal or private setting.

Account

Be sure to have a correct name. It will direct you to profile setting if you wish to change your name into real one. Twitter supports different languages. Choose the language you are more comfortable with. Select also the Time Zone you are at. You can also check the Tweet Location for you to add a location on your tweets, so that people can  see where you currently are. If you want to see the videos and photos from other people that you are not following you can check on the Tweet Media. Privacy is important in social networking, so if you want to protect your tweets then check the tweet privacy.

Password

If you choose to change your current password just type in your current password and your new password. This is one way to protect your twitter account.

Mobile

If you can’t get enough of your tweeting experience over your computer, you can add  your mobile for more tweeting experience.

Notices

Check and uncheck the notifications you want to receive in your email address or mobile phone.

Profile

Profile is one of the greatest feature of Twitter because it will appear on search result and make people identify you easily. You can upload your picture to let your followers see who you are.  Edit the bio to tell something about yourself. On your profile page, you will be able to see how many tweets you posted, who is/are following you, the number of  followers you have and lists.

Design

You can select your ready-made theme to personalize the look of your account. If you are a designer, or has an artwork background you want to use, you can also upload it for a more personalized feel.

Connections

It will let you manage the applications connecting to Twitter.

3. Follow your friends or anyone you want to get updates with or anything that interests you.

Just simply type on the search field and type in the username or the name of the person you want to find.

Then click on the Follow button.

That’s it you have successfully followed a friend, or in this case a celebrity. Just search and search all those people you want to be connected with. If you want to follow them in your mobile device, turn on the Device Updates. If you want to find your friends in your existing email accounts such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail & Messenger and LinkedIn just click on the Find Friends link and start to link with your friends.

You can also browse topics you are interested in such as Art & Design, Books, Business, Entertainment etc. that you can follow.

4. Share your tweets

Type in your tweets on the What’s happening? box at the Home page to start tweeting. You are allowed to type only 140 characters. You won’t be able to tweet your post if it’s more than 140 characters. If you are to tweet for a specific person on the list of people you follow, you just add ‘@’ sign plus username e.g. @jhanely2001 . Be sure to be careful on your tweets. When you start to tweet, you start to get public. People can read your tweets or activities so be sure to have a responsible tweeting.

5. Private message

If you want to privately message or directly message someone in your Twitter, click the Message tab and click New Message. Write down your message and be sure to put the username of the person you want to send a message.

6. What’s Hot?

Trends are the most talked about news, events or posts happening in Twitter. It can be worldwide or you can change it through cities. Be updated.  Be aware.

7. Be connected with third-party apps

Third-party applications are great way to sync all your updates into one application without directly accessing your Twitter account. You may also post your tweets on other social networking sites using Twitter in Facebook, TweetDeck and Twittelator Pro.

8. Get Help

If you are stuck on exploring Twitter, be sure to click the Help menu under the username drop down menu. You’ll never get lost again.

That’s all you need to learn to get started in your tweeting experience.  Explore, have fun and stay connected. Just tweet and tweet and tweet. It is  now your time to share your thoughts. Happy tweeting!

Target Your Audience

*Image by Michael S. Schwarzer

Before you start creating the logo guidelines, first you will need to understand who will be using the guidelines are they your client or will they be the employer of your client, what will they achieve from using them, how and/or where they can access the guidelines (this can either be a digital file like PDF or a printed logo guidelines book), and the last one is that why the logo guidelines it self being produced.

Gather The Essential Information

*Image by Metropol 21

Once you set up the target or knowing the reason why the guidelines is needed, you can start gathering the essential information to help your target see the concept through the logo you designed. You have to keep in mind that the following logo guidelines is made to help communicate your idea or concept to your brand’s audience.

Designing The Logo Guidelines

*Image by Industrial Scientific

In designing the logo guidelines, it’s best to match the look and feel of the brand itself and apply it on the guidelines. However, sometimes it is also best to keep it look simple and neat.

While designing on the logo guidelines book or paper sheet, there are few things that you should consider to do to achieve a better understanding for your audience, such as:

• Create section dividers between one subject to the other. For example, you will have the introduction first before the color palette section. You should separate these two sections using lines, rectangle blocks, or even start on new page for each different section.
• Write a comprehensible introduction or overview page to describe why the guidelines have been produced and how adhering to them will strengthen their brand.
• Remember that this is the guideline, therefore try to engage the user. Keep the explanation short and simple to understand.
• Be aware of the typographic hierarchy. Always differentiate the headline/headings with the introduction copy, body copy, or other typography content.
• Provide your logo guidelines target with examples of how the logo should, i.e the minimum size of the logo for print or for the website favicon.
• Always advice them about the mishandle logo, you could also explain it by including “the Do’s and the Don’t's” or “What To Avoid” section accompanied by the samples of common errors.

Distributing The Logo Guidelines

When distributing the logo guidelines, you can either create an interactive PDF or have it printed. This depends on whichever your client or target require them. However, you should always maintain the master file in Adobe Illustrator as it is easier to keep the print quality by using vector based program rather than Adobe Photoshop. As for distributing digitally,create these in the Master InDesign File and not within Acrobat, to save having to repeat the process with each revision.

Free Download

We have created a simple Logo Guidelines that you can download for free as a template to provide your client with the essential information.What other information do you put inside the logo guidelines? Let us know your thoughts on the comment below.

More resources related to logo design and guidelines:

• Brilliant Tips and Guidelines for Professional Logo Design
• Logo identity guideline template for download
• Identity Designed