The Blog Herald

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• Why Every Blogger Needs Access to a Designer
• How to Choose A Graphic Designer
• How To Automate Your Marketing Workflows
• How to Increase Blog Comments

Why Every Blogger Needs Access to a Designer Posted: 12 Dec 2013 04:00 AM PST Lately, there's been a lot of emphasis on how high-quality blog content is not only more engaging for readers, but it also ranks better in search engines. However, making an impact in the blogging world is about more than just writing posts people want to read. That's important, but there's another very important element to consider: design. Perhaps you're fortunate enough to have some design expertise under your belt and don't mind using those skills on your blog. If that situation doesn't apply, you'll soon see why it's such a good idea to hire a designer. Make Your Blog's Template Your Own Think of a template as an expression of your blog's brand. Although it's possible to purchase premium templates, wouldn't you rather have one that's all your own? A designer can be a great resource and create one that immediately gives readers clues about what to expect when coming to the blog for the first time. Templates are also useful if you participate in themed blogging, where the majority of your content relates to a niche topic. Take 12 Keys' blog, shown above, for example. As a recovery center, their blog reflects the bright and cheerful colors of their logo and their relaxing beachside location. Think about recruiting a designer to help you make small alterations to a template to reflect seasonal changes, as well. Google's Transcribe app recently did that by adding a Santa hat to the "e" of the logo in their transcription editor. Small changes like that can show readers you're a blogger who's not afraid to play with new themes throughout the year, and competent designers should be able to get different themes ready to go very quickly. Use Images to Brand Your Site It's also a good idea to add images on every page of your blog. They'll serve as visual reminders to orient readers, and can also continue to build your brand, especially if you're known for accompanying posts with pictures that feature corresponding characteristics, like vintage styles or landscape views. This will help give your blog its own visual branding. Try using your logo on every page to stimulate brand recognition, too. Social Media Examiner is great at branding. Their little explorer mascot is featured numerous times on each page – in the header and footer, beside the newsletter signup, and at least once in every blog post. At the same time, every element of their design channels the "charting the unknown" theme, their take on how reporting on social media is often exactly that. If your blog posts feature a lot of information or data, it can help to present it visually. While there are free tools to do this, if you have some design skills of your own or have access to a designer, these visualizations will be far more customized to your site and needs. Without the help of a designer, you might find more time gets spent figuring out how to smoothly incorporate images into the content than actually writing it. For more help, think about teaming up with professionals from an inbound marketing company. Make Sure Your Interface Is User-Friendly Even if your blog's content is interesting, you might be unknowingly driving users away with aspects of the site that are unnecessary, hard to use, or just not attractive. Readers want to become immersed in what they're reading, and a poor design can prevent that from happening. A designer can demonstrate how adding new features doesn't have to mean your blog will look cluttered. He or she can streamline things to promote visibility and also give readers access to archived content. Both of those changes could urge readers to stay on your blog longer, and have more enjoyable experiences while there. Smashing Magazine is the ultimate in user-friendliness. Their fully responsive design fits together in different ways depending on the size of the window. Shown below on a desktop and on an iPhone, different pieces are highlighted depending on the importance of each element. Besides their great adaptability, the design is simple and attractive and definitely great for getting immersed. Extend a Consistent Design to Social Media If you are hoping to build up a following on social media in addition to on your blog (and let's be honest, who isn't?), it is important to give your social sites a consistent look and feel to your own site. The ubiquity of Twitter and Facebook have given rise to a lot of fake and "imposter" accounts, and if your social pages are too plain, you may actually be mistaken for a fake! Be sure to customize where you can, by being sure to set a profile image and connecting to your site. On Twitter, you can and should upload a custom background, and on Facebook you can customize your page with tabs and other settings. Victor Mouse Traps features a consistent design across their social media accounts, as shown below. These are just a few reasons why your blog could benefit from a designer. Competition in the blogging world is fierce. Access to a designer may help you thrive in this challenging landscape. What do you think? Does having design skills or a strong friendship with a designer benefit you and your blog? Share in the comments below. The post Why Every Blogger Needs Access to a Designer appeared first on The Blog Herald.

How to Choose A Graphic Designer Posted: 11 Dec 2013 11:25 PM PST Congratulations! You need a graphic designer — usually a sign that you've reached the point where what you're doing now has an audience. Whether it's a new website, a company brochure or a simple logo, you're in the market for a graphic designer. But choosing a graphic designer can be a difficult, confusing or a nearly impossible process wherein you look at a portfolio of prior work and promise to pay for something that you've never seen, all with the hope that the designer captures your untold vision in perfect form. The Truth about Design Good design requires both a good designer and a good client. The best way to interview a graphic designer starts with understanding that even the most skilled designer may not deliver what you want if you have no idea what you want. However, that being said, there are many things you can, should and must ask before considering any designer for your job. After all, this design is going to represent your company and what could be more important than that? When it comes to choosing a graphic designer who will meet your design needs, you have plenty of options. Try looking for a freelance designer, posting your requirements on a specialist site like 99designs.com, or hiring a professional virtual services company likeWorldwide101 that can support you with designers, project managers and other small business services. Reviewing Past Work It is a common mistake to look at a designer's portfolio and picture your project in a previous work. First and foremost, you should not picture your work as someone else's. If you already know you want a certain look or feel, such as modern with clean lines or dramatic and complex, look for designers with portfolios heavy in that type of design. Not sure what you're looking for? Be prepared to provide samples of designs and aesthetics that you do like, with detailed notes and explanations. If you're doing something complex, such as a full website design, do your research and provide samples of all the features you like and don't like and look for these in your potential designer's former work. Get Some Face Time In These days it is really common to do everything via text and email. Yet, if you can grab some face time with potential designers, you can get a feeling for whether they really understand what you're looking for. If you can't meet in person, try for a Skype or other video-based meeting. If your designer hears you explain what you're looking for and you hear him or her explain the way they see it working out, you might come to a meeting of the minds much quicker. Preparing for Design Once you've narrowed down your designers, its time to get a clear picture of how the process is going to work. You're the one hiring and you need to be ready to make sure your interests are protected. Make sure multiple revisions are included in the process and consider payment terms upon milestones rather than hours worked. If possible, seeing rough conceptual drafts of the designer's intentions and direction will help make sure your project is heading in the right direction.  Depending on your project, these drafts may include basic wireframes, which are rough sketches of the anticipated layout of a web design or user flow, or a perhaps a mood board, which may include colors, fonts and other general aesthetics they're considering.  In this way you can guide or agree on basic design direction before work and time is wasted. Think Long-Term The best designer-client relationships become long-term engagements with a clear understanding of branding and execution. If you think your project is going to be one of many, express that to your designer and set the stage for future work. It will help at the outset to create a clear method of communication and a comfortable forum for discussion and editing. If you and your designer are comfortable together, you will receive better results. If you're not, remember that you're the boss and consider looking elsewhere if things don't suit your needs. About the author: Sandra Lewis is the Founder and CEO of Worldwide101 (@bestvirtualhelp), a virtual professional services company, which provides Admin and Customer Service for companies worldwide. Born and raised in France, Sandra has travelled extensively as a Project Manager to Asia, Australia, North America and in various parts of both Eastern and Western Europe. During her career she has worked as Operations Manager for companies such as Regus and BuroServices, with a focus on supporting small businesses to be effective as they scale. Setting an example of the efficiencies gained working virtually, she manages her entire team on 4 continents, on a virtual basis. The post How to Choose A Graphic Designer appeared first on The Blog Herald.

How To Automate Your Marketing Workflows Posted: 11 Dec 2013 10:40 PM PST As a marketing professional, you are always looking for ways to enhance the effectiveness of your marketing efforts – and ultimately to drive more sales for your organization. However, marketing has become increasingly complicated over the last decade – there are many more channels to manage simultaneously, and markets are becoming more fragmented and diverse. Many marketing teams struggle to deal with this complexity, in large part because they still rely on manual processes that don't scale to meet the new reality.   Marketing automation is designed to address this issue – and to actually let marketing teams capitalize on complexity to maximize their effectiveness. It does this by intelligently automating repetitive marketing tasks, integrating existing marketing systems, and providing comprehensive analytic capabilities that deliver new customer insights. By combining these three aspects, automated workflow software significantly enhances marketing effectiveness and efficiency, and ultimately delivers significant competitive advantage and increased sales opportunities. To illustrate this, consider the following simple example. You mount an online marketing campaign to promote the latest release of one of your software products. This campaign might consist of an email campaign, a concurrent social media campaign and several other initiatives. Ultimately, this results in visitors to one or more landing pages on your website, where they are asked to fill in a form to request further information. In the past, you would probably set up an email responder to let the prospect know that you have received the details and to provide them with the information that they have requested. However, past that point, the process was manual – someone sifted through the leads, and then forwarded them to the appropriate salesperson. At that point, marketing usually lost visibility. Marketing automation changes this scenario completely. Prospects will still receive an initial email response, but that is only the first stage of a completely automated process designed to convert the lead into a real sale – as well as extract useful customer intelligence. For example, a marketing automation system can automatically score leads based on a set of criteria that you establish, and then forward them to the appropriate sales people without any manual intervention. It can even make intelligent decisions about how the leads should be treated – high-priority leads could be forwarded to an outside sales team, while low priority leads are passed off to inside sales. However, automation does not stop at that point – the marketing automation system then sets up a customized drip marketing campaign for that individual prospect, tailoring it to their specific profile. Furthermore, it integrates with your sales management system so that it can track the progress of leads – this allows you to analyze the effectiveness of your campaign. You can determine which channels were most effective, which messages had the most impact, and which customer segments showed the most positive response – based on actual sales, not just on lead generation. Of course, if the majority of your sales come through an e-commerce platform, then you will want to integrate your marketing automation platform with that rather than a sales management system such as Salesforce.com – but the same principle applies. Another benefit of a marketing automation platform is that it provides a unified view of each customer across all touch points. For instance, consider the case where an existing customer contacts your customer service department with a query about one of your products they have already purchased. This information will typically be captured in your CRM system. A marketing automation system can analyze that interaction for triggers which you specify, and then forward the interaction to the appropriate salesperson if needed. They then have the opportunity to manage any issues that arose during the interaction, as well as to see if there is any upsell opportunity. In addition to these campaign management, sales support and analytics capabilities, a good marketing automation platform will also significantly increase your available marketing bandwidth. Not only does it automate tasks such as lead management and responding to prospects, it also provides a single point of integration for all of your existing point marketing tools – for example, creating an overall dashboard that gives you complete visibility of a particular campaign so that you can make more effective marketing decisions. It will also automate major marketing initiatives, such as the scheduling of multichannel, multistage campaigns. This means that once you have set them up, they execute without any further manual intervention by marketing staff, and will alert you if there are any major developments that you need to take action on immediately. The post How To Automate Your Marketing Workflows appeared first on The Blog Herald.

How to Increase Blog Comments Posted: 11 Dec 2013 07:00 AM PST Having an active and engaged blog community is at the top of every blogger's wish list. While the goal is clearly outlined, the way to get there sometimes isn't. Although not guaranteed, there are some ways that you can get more comments onto your blog. Paid Traffic Sometimes getting a high level of engagement does take a financial commitment. In this case, having paid campaigns to get more traffic to your website will certainly increase your chances of more engagement, especially when they come from social media. Do some research on paid social media campaigns on Facebook and Twitter and also through the major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. Facebook and Google also occasionally send out coupons to new account users, so be sure to research that before signing up for a new account. Answering Existing Comments Are you already engaging enough with your existing user base? Readers like to see that bloggers are engaged with their active audience before chiming in themselves. Be sure to answer all comments, even if it is just to thank them for reading your blog. This goes a long way and usually only takes a few moments. Ghost Commenters While it might be a controversial tactic, having some "ghost" commenters on your blog might increase the number of comments from actual readers. It is pretty easy to get caught, especially if your comments are too general (e.g. "Great post!") or they are being posted from the same IP address. So, ask friends and family to comment when they read your posts or occasionally use a library or friend's computer to write comments. Test this strategy with a few of your most popular posts (based on traffic analytics) and see if it can drum up more actual comments. Charged Topics People like to give their opinion on topics that are controversial or ask the tough questions. While you shouldn't publish things that are purposefully making people mad, consider writing about hot topics within your target niche and see if that can get more of a conversation going. Ask Questions Many popular bloggers ask a question to the readers at the end of their posts. This could be related to the topic of the post, or be something random that relates to the blogger's personal life or current events. Many people take the time to answer questions on blog posts because it feels like the writer was asking them directly. photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc The post How to Increase Blog Comments appeared first on The Blog Herald.

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