Digital-By-Design

A tagline can be the best and cheapest form of advertising a company ever uses.

Get it right and the tagline tells the world why they should do business with your company

So how do you come up with a winner?

Start by figuring out what you want your tagline to achieve.

Pick a tagline and stick with it.

Here are 10 tips for a tasty tagline:  http://bit.ly/JGQg80 

1. Make it short

2. Make it simple

3. Make it about the customer

4. Make it a benefit

5. Make it a call to action

6. Make the punctuation round or curvy

7. Make it work with your logo

8. Make it specific

9. Make it pizzazzy

10. Make it clever

Source: http://bit.ly/JGQg80 

Reputation and engagement are increasingly important factors when it comes to reaching your audience through email marketing.

For a Marketer, this is the most fragile, difficult relationship to maintain: email engagement.

One wrong step can end in tragedy with your electronic correspondence in the spam folder.

Litmus' Infographic provides a closer look at engagement filtering behaviors for Gmail and Hotmail, reasons why subscribers become disengaged with email, and tips for increasing engagement.

Find out how to avoid this tragic fate when sending your emails to the masses: http://bit.ly/JteYK8 ;

Last week I uncovered a study that showed links from a Google+ Page have a significant effective on your search rankings.

Well it seems that Google isn’t just taking notice of links on it’s own platform when it comes to Social Media signals.

Branded3.com - http://bit.ly/L6xllo - used their award-winning petition website, Twitition, with over 1.4 million Twitter followers, 7.6 million signatures on over 198,000 petitions as a base for their recent study.

Key Findings

>>Study shows that URLs receive a significant boost in Google rankings when they are shared on Twitter
>>The effects of this boost seem to level out at around 50 tweets, and the subsequent benefit of gaining additional tweets is minimal until around 5,000 tweets
>>After 5,000 tweets the average ranking of URLs improves considerably
>>URLs receiving over 7,500 tweets almost always rank inside the top 5 results
>>Average rankings are heavily correlated to the number of tweets about each URL

Impact On Brands

Brands need to be encouraging users to retweet links to commercial pages as part of their social media campaigns, in order to take advantage of the increased rankings that this strategy can deliver.

SEO benefits can help tie social media activity to revenue figures and encourage further investment in the channel.

What This Means For Brands

Most brands understand the need for social engagement but relatively few have plans in place to actively encourage users to share links to their primary commercial pages.

Now that the correlation between tweets and rankings has been demonstrated -  http://bit.ly/L6yw4i [Report PDF] brands need to develop strategies to build more social engagement using tactics such as ‘retweet to enter’ style competitions, and other innovative social media ideas designed to encourage customers and fans to share commercial pages and help improve rankings.

Original Post: http://bit.ly/L6yR7c 

When your hosting fails and your site is down, you could be losing potential new customers and sales.

Maintaining 100% uptime is critical to your business’ success. That’s why it’s a good idea to sign up for a service that will monitor your uptime and notify you the minute your site is down.

Sarah Gooding has put together, 

12 free services you can use to monitor your site's uptime: http://bit.ly/K9wa2u 

Monitor.us - http://bit.ly/K9wRsA - is my personal favorite, offering unlimited monitors and email notifications for free.

Do web searchers pay attention to the domain where the link in the search results leads them?

Now, it seems, more web searchers are paying attention to what’s in the URL.

A Study by Stanford and Microsoft Researchers - http://bit.ly/JpTSMb [PDF] shows that domains are becoming a potent force in consumer click behavior. In a test they compare to a “Pepsi/Coke blind taste test,” they found that domains could flip a user’s preference 25% of the time.

The Study notes that “Top 30″ domains increasingly dominate search results: http://bit.ly/JpU1PQ 

This concentration would seem to create a self-reinforcing trend. If the top handful of sites get more clicks and create more user engagement, they will rise even higher in the rankings due to Google’s emphasis on such metrics as part of its post-Panda ranking algorithm.

Marketing Implications

One big takeaway is that life is getting tougher for marketers with lesser-known domains. First, it’s increasingly hard to rank well for popular search terms; it’s been many years since an SEO-savvy site-builder could publish a few pages and outrank the top brands for competitive terms. It appears that the most popular domains continue to gain ground against anyone else.

Second, even if a lesser-known domain claws its way to the top few results, it will face an uphill battle if the other results are branded domains familiar to consumers.

Here are a few quick prescriptions for marketers:

#1. If you have a domain name known to consumers, exploit that advantage by adding content and employing good SEO strategies and architecture. Site traffic will grow, and the process will reinforce itself.
#2. If your domain is unknown, focus on improving your rankings and your displayed info (title/snippet) to offset the domain bias effect. Position and relevance still drive clicks.
#3. Work to build your domain as a brand. Over time, you’ll gain clicks.
#4. Be wary of starting microsites on new domains. Trust/credibility will be higher on a recognized domain.

In short, use domain bias to your advantage if you can. If not, then recognize that better-known domains will siphon away your search traffic and strive to improve relevance, rankings, and, over time, your branding.

Original Article Here: http://bit.ly/JpU1PQ 

SEO is one of the key ways to get visibility for your website and brand.

According to a Study by The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 92% of online adults use search engines to find information on the Web. So how do you get your business to rank in search engines organically?

Inbound links play a big role in optimizing your online presence for organic search.

The more links you have pointing to your site, the more traffic and better rankings you can secure through search engines.

Inbound links bring three major benefits to your business:

#Traffic & Leads
#Search Engine Rankings (Residual Traffic)
#Brand Exposure & Awareness

So how do you go about accumulating inbound links?

There is a range of marketing tactics you can leverage to collect inbound links.

In HubSpot’s guide, “10-Step Guide to Social Link Building”, ten of these methods are covered and don’t require you to spend a dime on advertising.

Here are 10 suggestions:

#Write Guest Blog Posts
#Run Contests
#Stir Controversy
#Add Your Website/Blog to Directories
#Publish Content as Lists
#Coin New Terms
#Write How-to or Instructional Content
#Offer Badges
#Leverage Social Networks
#Syndicate Your Content

Grab your copy of the guide here   [PDF] http://bit.ly/K5DVIU 

“Sure, metrics like top pages viewed, keyword search volume and social media shares can help you align content marketing efforts with audience need, but are you overlooking one of the most telling metrics—content interactions?

Start tracking if visitors are downloading, playing, pausing, sharing or emailing your content today.

The more you know about how your audiences consume your content, the more you know about how to market to them. The more you know.”

Start tracking content interactions in Google Analytics to improve your content marketing efforts:

#1. Events v. Virtual Pageviews

Events let you easily capture valuable details—such as content topic, format, visitor action, and value—with each click on your content. Also:

Virtual Pageviews can artificially inflate pages per visit and total pageviews.
Events have pre-built reports within Google Analytics that are easier to dissect and analyze.
For details on how to set up Events within Google Analytics, read Google’s instructions here:

#2. Create a Content Tracking System

A set of rules that guide how to track visitor content interactions.Google Events offer several tracking variables—category, action, label and value—to help you create this system.

#3. User-Focused Content Strategy

The insight provided by well-tracked content interactions—combined with other Google Analytic metrics like top pages viewed and organic keyword visits—provides you with the information you need to craft a user-focused content marketing strategy.

The more you know about what content your audiences want, the more you know how to market to them.

This Infographic sheds some light on just how much digital clutter we have in our lives.

Humans have access now to more information than ever before. But with the constant stream — more like a flood — of information and storage, we often forget how much of that data just sits unused, neglected and forgotten in the digital ether.

A bad tagline is worse than none at all, and that covers about 80% of the market. Learn how great taglines are made.

Taglines are everywhere—but finding a good one isn’t as easy as you’d think.

What steps can you take to write a tagline that’s effective?

Take a look at these five essential qualities that describe the best taglines:

1. Clear: Your tagline is not the place to be subtle; it should be informative. Its job is to communicate, quickly and clearly, what it is that you do and what you have to offer.

How to Do It: Ask yourself what your company’s mission is. What is your purpose? What’s your focus?

2. Concise: The best taglines have one thing in common: they’re simple. Write your tagline to be easy to remember and within 10 words or less.
How to Do It: Streamline your company’s message into one simple, short phrase.

3. Relevant: The information that speaks to the reader’s “What’s in it for me?”

How to Do It: Take time to name client benefits:

4. Branded: A good tagline is reflective of the brand it represents. It must seamlessly match the overall sense of your style and other marketing efforts in order to enhance your impact.

How to Do It: Ask yourself what differentiates you from the competition. What is your style: witty or formal, clean-cut or colorful?

5. Consistent: A tagline’s greatest strengths lies in its consistency—that clients can count on it, year after year, to stay the same.

How to Do It: Aim to write a tagline that’s timeless, one that won’t become dated as trends change in the next few years.

Stick with it, on all your marketing materials and across your branding efforts.

eMedia revenue growth plateaus as corporate profits improve slightly.

30% of large publishers are also planning online startups, but only 13% plan an ancillary service launch, and 10% indicate a new magazine is in the works.

eMedia revenues are considered the fastest-growing segment among both small and large publishers. 51% of smaller publishers indicate eMedia is the fastest growing part of their organization while 73% of larger publishers say the same.

Of the sources that publishers are expecting increases from this year, 65% of small publishers expect it from e-media, 57% from new print advertisers and 47% from existing print advertisers.

A significant percentage of large publishers (86%) also expect increases from e-media, but they’re much more bullish on events, with 56% expecting growth from that segment. Only 24% of smaller publishers are anticipating growth from events.

Top priorities for both small and large publishers in 2012 are focused on boosting revenue and profits, close behind is expanding their Web businesses.

Click here for Full PDF Of this Survey with Charts

This detailed Infographic by Go-Gulf covers the latest online advertising spending statistics, Internet Ad spending trends, Online Ad spending by region.

The online advertising market is experiencing continuous, significant growth each year.

More and more companies are now allocating a significant portion of their marketing budget for online advertising, over traditional methods, mainly for the following three reasons:

1) It is easy to track online advertising campaign performance

2) Companies can easily create customized advertising campaigns for specific audience groups
3) It is easy to make changes to online campaigns than to traditional advertising campaigns

All businesses, no matter what they make or sell, should recognize the power and financial value of good design.

Reference to good design as a broad and deliberately applied discipline, with the aim of creating simpler, more meaningful, rewarding experiences for customers.

Why have people become so design sensitive?

Apple’s global dominance has elevated our design expectations, or Ikea’s vision to bring great design at affordable prices or perhaps the Internet has taught us what well-designed user experiences and good design really are.

Likely, it is a combination of all.

The design bar has been raised and design-oriented businesses are winning. 

Design-oriented organizations invest in thinking this stuff through. They put design at the heart of their company to guide innovation and to continually improve products, service and marketing. They recognize that a great design leads to differentiation, customer loyalty and higher profits.

Thoughtful and innovative design makes us feel good.

Finally, Adam Swann -  http://bit.ly/Jtav2M  -  states this is a call to action for executives to recognize this new era and make the effort to transform even a mundane product or service into something more rewarding and more memorable.

Managing a website relaunch or launch is not straight forward; there are so many issues to consider from marketing strategy, customer experience to content strategy to the technical challenges of selecting and integrating different technology platforms and web services.

Here are 20 key points: http://bit.ly/JIymfF

1. Define Vision, strategy, goals

2. Consider audience and users’ needs

3. Schedule planning, phasing, piloting and testing

By figuring out what’s most important to launch first, you can have more focused results and then you are setting yourself up for the ongoing quality of your site.

 Think also about the maintenance and sustainability of the site in all relevant ways – financial resources, staffing, design, technical upgrades, etc.

4. Plan your content strategy

Planning content is key

Too often too much time and attention is spent on the application rather than the content and user experience. The best CMS cannot compensate for poor visual design or lacklustre content

5. Review changes in landscape and technology

Anything from business model, regulations and laws, your knowledge base, to new opportunities and innovation

6. Get the budget and resourcing estimates right

7. Put in place measurement, analytics, KPIs

Working out how you will measure performance and success on an ongoing basis is essential

8. Define a Leadership / project governance structure

Appoint a single person to implement the online strategy and give them the authority to make decisions.

9. Get stakeholder engagement and “buy in”

 Define the engagement process

10. Establish which platforms you’re serving

 Consider the platforms on which the site will be used: does it need to work adaptively for mobile devices now and in the future. Will it need regular upgrades after launch to allow for new features and functionality? If so, how will these upgrades be made (and paid for)? How will it deal with the inexorable march of browser specs?”

11. How does the website fit into the wider online and offline world?

12. Enable sharing

Make sure it’s really easy to share, like, tweet etc. every page of your website

13. Branding and visual design

Clearly this is a major consideration – and often the most apparent change externally

Don’t under or overvalue visual design, just because it’s what everybody talks about.”

14. Plan for SEO from the beginning

SEO considerations need to be an integral part of the site design process.”

15. Get the requirements right for the content management systems

16. Plan launch marketing and messaging

“If you build it they will come. No they won’t.”

Social marketing/strategy is important but don’t overlook the need for:

a) Good old fashioned marketing. b) Your ‘attitude’. c) Your approach – take a look at your message. If it takes you half a page to describe what you want your reader to know – then you need to go back and redo it.

17. Make sure your site performance is sufficient

Google will penalise you for slow-loading pages (we have the data to prove it) – but this opens up a whole can of worms – because to accomplish speed you sometimes need to compromise on the dynamic and the beautiful.

18. Get the technology delivery capacity right

Spending too much is a waste of money. Spending too little will literally cost you money.

19. Don’t start with the homepage

Design the homepage at the end of the process – or as near as you can, because designing a homepage before you have confirmed the information architecture, defined the key needs of the users, etc, will mean numerous changes

20. Stay fit and well

a) Sleep b) Eat c) Exercise d) Meditate e) Practice - Being humble!

It’s going to be great

Original Post: http://bit.ly/JIymfF

Designing a website user interface can be a struggle match. If you're building a small portfolio or simple blog layout there isn't as much to worry about.

However an entire magazine requires featured stories and sidebar widgets and author profiles. There is a lot to consider!

Here are some examples of brilliant UI design focused around online magazines. Some current trends in the field of web design and how you can capitalize on these ideas and build your own stunning web magazine layouts.

#Big Things Gain Attention

#Offer Related User Content

#Simplicity at its Finest

#Developing a Footer

#Brazen Branding

#Showcase Gallery

Continue here: http://bit.ly/JUA7gc 

Have you jumped on the Infographic craze yet?

Now we have visual noise, and lots of it.

So what does it take to make a good infographic?
Well, the folks over at Customer Managnetism  -  http://bit.ly/JGARot have come up with an interesting and appropriate take on the topic.

This image may be the quintessential Infographic on Infographics.

Source: http://bit.ly/JGCt1r 

Paid search has cemented itself as a highly viable, cost effective marketing channel. Worldwide, paid search a $34 billion industry.

Facts and Stats:

»« By 2016, paid search is expected to grow by 75% to become a $61.1 billion industry
»« Since 2006, the amount spent on paid search has increased by 250%
»« Google Adwords has a declining return on investment (ROI), down 12% as of 1/2011
»« Bing & Yahoo Advertising has an increasing return on investment (ROI), up 10% as of 1/2011
»« Paid search is currently bigger than radio, outdoor and cinema advertising
»« The average cost per click is up 11% (year over year) for Google, and 4% for Bing

What if you could get up to 30% more traffic by using a special code on your pages?

This code ties directly into Google’s new Knowledge Graph.

A new Algorithm aimed at narrowing the “Thing” you are looking for.

This whole new code was developed between the three major Search Engines – actually three new codes were developed and they are all supported by Google, Yahoo and Bing.

The three main types of code or “mark-up” are called: RDFA, Microformat and Microdata.

Continue reading: http://bit.ly/LdJSjB 

Most are accepting the fact that cell phones and smart phones can and will make your life easier to manage; especially when you're in a pinch.

The new culture of immediate information through social media, apps and web browsing phones is allowing people to gain access to information more quickly than ever before, and the latest Pew Research sheds an immediate light on just that.

It also represents a huge opportunity for inbound marketers.

Mobile marketing is no longer a luxury, but rather, a requirement.

Download / Embed: http://bit.ly/LLRzjV 

Using what we know about Panda – this should be a regular update.

Ten ways to recover from Penguin and avoid future penalties:

#1. Remove Paid Text Links Using Exact Match Anchor Text

#2. Remove Comment Spam

#3. Remove Guest posts on questionable sites

#4.  Remove Article Marketing Sites

#5. Avoid Links from Dangerous Sites

#6. Focus on Social Media Links

#7. Focus on relevant Directory Links

#8. Focus on Press Releases

#9. Focus on sharable content on your Press Release

#10. Press Releases Sharable: Add a Video, Infographic, Image and a Download to each

Continue reading a list of many of the quality things to look for: http://bit.ly/Ker3At

A list of 27 awesome WordPress plugins to help make your blog the best it can be for you and your readers.

[Four Plugins are specific to the Genesis Framework]

The great thing about self-hosted WordPress blogging is the amount of plugins available to help you make your site just the way you want it.

These can range from social sharing options, design tools, subscription options, e-commerce solutions and much more.

Download PDF Version to use as reference when looking for plugins to install on your WordPress site:

http://bit.ly/M2ZQCr 

Neil Patel discusses the advantage you can gain by getting your site indexed by search engines before it’s even launched.
The best reason to get your domain online…and that is building an email marketing list, buzz and traffic.

1. Register an SEO-friendly domain name immediately

Keep in mind that search engines tend to rank websites higher that have relevant first-level keywords in their domain name

2. Create a compelling landing page

There is no need to put a “Coming Soon.” Instead, give some sort of option so you can capture any and every bit of traffic to your new site, which includes an exit pop up

3. Start a blog and sign up for Feedburner

Put up a blog that sits off your domain. It doesn’t matter which blogging platform you use, just make sure that the blog is sitting off of your root domain: yourwebsite.com/blog.

4. Create content for your site

Before it’s officially launched you can start posting content to your new website blog. This will give visitors to your site something to engage when they arrive after you launch.

Start putting the content on right now.
And the more content the better.

5. Guest blog on strategic sites

…and in your byline make sure you create a link back to your soon-to-be launched website.

6. Use your existing sites

Just like most of SEO strategies, getting links to your site is essential in getting high search rankings…and fortunately you don’t have to wait until your new site is launched to start optimizing it…

You can do it the moment you have the domain registered. Within a month you should see results to the new website. In the end, the lesson is this: you don’t have to wait until your website is “launched” to start driving traffic to it and getting it ranked. You can do it now!

Original Article: http://bit.ly/K1xcQp 

Every web designer loves to have high-quality icons at their disposal.

While creating your own custom icons for your projects is an option, it’s rarely practical.

These free icons sets from WDL are some of the most useful and helpful resources because of the time they can save and because of the impact they can have on the sites that you are desigining.

There are a wide variety of different types of icons, styles, and sizes. You’ll certainly find at least a few sets that you can put to good use in your own work

Download: http://bit.ly/LbHX1o 

A lot that has to be considered when trying to engage your audience because you’re not writing for an audience of one, but of many.

And all of them have a personality and motivations of their very own!

When creating engaging content, there are two concepts that you must first understand:

1. Why visitors are on your site and

2. What they want to find

These two concepts can be translated into two words:  

Personas = Motivation (what the visitor needs, why they are on your site and

Personalities = Temperament (how they navigate, what they need to see or read to find what they want)

If you want to create content that engages with your audience and motivates them to take the conversion action you desire, you have to get into the mind of the visitor.

Know what they want and why, and then you can create content that engages readers on their level and allows your content to meet their specific needs.

Stoney G deGeyter has three very basic personas that can provide a solid framework for just about any visitor. 

#1. The “How-To” Persona

Information seeker - likes checklists, how-to guides, videos and any other information they can get their digital hands on

#2. The “I Care” Persona

Researching something they care about - passionate about a topic and likely to consider themselves extremely knowledgeable. Anything less than authoritative content will likely leave them unimpressed

#3. The “Just Get It To Me” Persona

Don’t really know what they want but don’t care about much of anything other than, “how do I get this (or do this) fast?”

It’s possible to incorporate elements (or links) for each of these into a single page.

The better your personas, the better targeted your content will be, and more likely it will be to produce the conversions you want.

See how big WordPress has grown in all different area's of the CMS market, based on the Stats in this Infographic  by Joost de Valk!

WordPress dominates the top 100 blogs in the world. Only time will tell, but it’s safe to assume that WordPress will also then play an important role.

How many times do you plan to win the lottery in your lifetime? Seems like a silly question. Even if you reply “Just once,” you seem bad at math at best. But this is the exact mentality that’s fueling Internet Gold Rush 2.0.

And yet, there’s never been a better time to start your own company. There is a true entrepreneurial gold rush going on thanks to the Internet … it just may be a bit different than you think.

The true online opportunity for entrepreneurs is in content. It’s about blazing a path as a digital media producer, while redefining media business models for the better.

Here are three big reasons why: http://onforb.es/IsNdfA  

1. The Content is the Marketing

Being a new media content producer naturally attracts awareness for your products or services. That’s what marketing is supposed to do, and content is how it’s done effectively online.

2. The Audience-Enabled Lean Startup

The best way is to hold off on the product, and first develop a minimum viable audience.

3. The Power of an Unfair Advantage

(i) Retain more equity

(ii) Products come to you

(iii) Better business development

(iv) Easier talent attraction

(v) Own a media asset

The difference between startups that stumbled onto this approach last decade, and today’s lean-minded entrepreneurs, is the wealth of data and established tactics and strategies for audience building