Here is a very interesting sounding event at the Victoria design festival, State of Design. At Design Quotes we are all about bringing in the work. We understand that designers use us as just one of many tools to get new work. Marketing one's own business is still important which is exactly what this talks is all about.
As designers we are often so caught up in the making of objects that we forget to market them properly. This seminar looks at some of the strategies and tactics that designers can employ to put themselves out there.
To learn more, check out the event page:
http://www.stateofdesign.com.au/Festival/Search/Design-Victoria-Get-Noticed-Its-Called-PR-Darling
At Design Quotes our primary objective is to help design companies and freelancers grow their business. In an effort to increase our support, we are partnering up with the very best products and services available to the design industry.
After months of research and evaluation looking for the ideal business website platform, we are very pleased to announce our partnership with Adobe's Business Catalyst.
What is Business Catalyst?
BC is a the ultimate all-in-one rebrandable, online hosted application that allows your clients to:
- Build and manage their website
- Write a blog and build a forum
- Run an online shop and accept payments
- Create email marketing campaigns
- Build a customer database
- Analyze and improve website performance
Why Use BC
Business Catalyst helps you build amazing sites and close more deals so that you can create higher profits and grow your design business. Business Catalyst was built for designers. The highly customizable system puts the creative power in your hands to achieve your client's wishes. Their Dreamweaver plugin and FTP support means you can work however you want to. Best of all, their support and training materials teaches you to sell better and implement faster.
If you run a small internet business and are struggling to attract cheap traffic, I've got a bit of a plan for you. One of the best ways to fix your problem is to get one or two pages ranked in the top 3 spots of Google. This is actually easier than you think if you find the right keywords you want to rank for in seach engine results. So here is a step-by-step guide to finding a good keyword and getting ranked for it quickly.
Overview
In this guide I'll show you how to:
- find a good keyword to rank for;
- create a keyword targeted landing page; and
- get a range of inbound links to the keyword targeted page.
Step 1: Researching Non-competitive Keywords
While it woul be great to rank in the top 3 positions of a search results page for keywords that have 10,000 of searches per month, it is unrealistic that this will happen without working at it for 12 months. Instead, I'm going to suggest that you optimise for lots of "longtail keywords" (keyword phrases with 3 or more words) with less traffic. You will have much more success this way. Then when you add up the traffic from lots of longtail keywords, you will still have a lot of traffic.
Let's use a pet store business as an example. Instead of trying to rank for "pet store" which has 63,000,000 results and is very competitive, it is better to add a few words the increase relevancy and decrease compeition. One of the simple ways to do this is to use a product name along with location information. For example the product could be "dog food" and the location could be "New York". Hence the longtail keyword becomes "dog food new york". Using Google's Keyword Tool, we can check the search volume for this new keyword. There are 590 searches for this phrase each month in the USA.
Step 2: Create a Keyword Targetted Landing Page
Many people think that all their traffic should go to the homepage of their website. However if you want to target lots of keywords, then the homepage is going to become too densly packed with keywords which will look strange to human users. It is much better to create single purpose landing pages. We have an example here for Melbourne Web Design. A keyword optimised landing page should have a strong call to action, such as "sign up" or "enquire". It also needs around about 300 words of unique high quality content. In the pet store example, this should be a dedicated product page. When it comes to building the page itself, we recommend getting a professional designer to design a "landing page". You will need to spend a bit of time planning the purpose of this page with the designer. A simple landign page design will cost between $300 - $600.
Step 3: Generate Inbound Links
Why do you need inbound links? This is still the #1 factor that determines the position of a search result. If you have a page that contains a keyword phrase like "dog food new york" and a bunch of links that point to this page using "dog food new york" as the anchor text, you will very quickly get a high position in a search result.
This is often the hardest part which is why I suggest outsourcing this step. While you could spend days on end submitting your new landing page URL to hundreds of directories, then is an excellent company that can do this for you cery cheaply.
First I recommend submitting the URL to some directories and waiting 2 - 3 weeks. If you do not see your page rank, then I suggest buying a keyword promoter package. This package will bring in a whole range of link types which Google and other search engines will look at very favourably.
To outsource the link building step head over to WL Marketing.
Good luck with you new rankings. Feel free to leave a comment and let us know how you go!
Name: Daniel
Email:
Web Site: http://au.linkedin.com/in/danielduckworth
Bio: Daniel is a co-founder of Design Quotes and specialises in internet business marketing. Daniel consults on search engine optimsation, internet marketing, web design and graphic design.
Small Business Victoria Workshops / Seminars
Places are still available in the following low-cost workshops and seminars:
Business Planning Basics: Werribee (14 Apr), Echuca (14 Apr), Shepparton (28 Apr)
Business Planning: St Kilda (20, 27 Apr & 4, 11 May)
Cashflow Management: Narre Warren (21 Apr), Morwell (22 Apr)
Get Your Business Organised: Omeo (12 Apr)
Green Business, Lean Business: Nunawading (20 Apr)
How to Handle Your Bank: Moonee Ponds (15 Apr)
Managing Stock, Suppliers & Debtors: Warragul (20 Apr), Ballarat (21 Apr)
Marketing Basics: Pakenham (15 Apr), Skipton (27 Apr), Yarrawonga (28 Apr), Eltham (28 Apr)
Marketing for Growth: St Kilda (14 Apr), Wodonga (15 Apr), Warrnambool (21 Apr), Bright (22 Apr)
Starting Your Bus! iness: Brunswick (14 Apr), Lilydale (15 Apr), Doncaster (21 Apr)
For information about these and other events and to book, visit their Workshops and Events Calendar and search by the name of the seminar or workshop.
Name: Daniel
Email:
Web Site: http://au.linkedin.com/in/danielduckworth
Bio: Daniel is a co-founder of Design Quotes and specialises in internet business marketing. Daniel consults on search engine optimsation, internet marketing, web design and graphic design.
The Weekly Round Up is a series dedicated to highlighting the most interesting graphic design, web design and animation resources each week. Feel free to subscribe to the Design Resources Weekly Round Up RSS Feed.
Icon Finder is an impressive database of free icons with an intuitive search and browse interface. Icons are categorised by sets which helps to maintain a consistent theme when designing a website interface. There is a massive set of social media icons as well as many others. A very useful resource.
This is just brilliant. The sales process of winning new work is a delicate process. Many creative agencies are small boutique operations of a a few designers playing a bunch of different roles. This helps to make the sales role a little more turn-key, consistent and measurable.
“Proposable makes generating professional-level proposals a cinch,” says Gube, “and it has reporting features to analyze the performance of your proposals. It was created for salespeople, but as a designer, being a salesperson is a huge part of the gig, whether you’re freelancing or pitching a design idea to your managers.”
We all do it. When we start a fresh website interface design project, we start sketching out our ideas. Which is an important step which ultimately saves time. However there are elements of sketching an interface that are usually the same each time. These free templates help streamline the interface sketching process, saving even more time adding value to your project.
4. A Zoomable jQuery Image Gallery Called jPhotoGrid
View Demo | Download Zip
It's another jquery image gallery, but this one is a little different and kinda neat. It takes a list of images and turns it into a grid where individual images are zoomed to the fore with a click. Good for catalogue type websites or portoflio websites. You can see a demo of the gallery in action.
Marvelous! More and more websites are integrating web apps. One of the most common requirements of a web form is geographical location data. This nifty database provides us with every country, place and city plus additional statistical information about each location such as timezones, populations and capitals.
The data comes in tab-delimited + utf-8 formatted text files and can be downloaded as a whole or per country.
This provides a simple was to quickly check how a website will render in various web browsers and their versions.
