Website Design and Development

Branding Authors: Checklist for Marketing Beyond the Book Design

May 2nd, 2013 | Posted in Blog, Books, Brand Visibility, Branding, Design, marketing, Website Design and Development | 1 Comment
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Did you just write a book or e-book and it’s headed to an experienced graphic designer for a great cover and interior design? Now start thinking about the big picture.

Your branding across the web.

If you haven’t given this much thought yet, below is a check list to be sure you are ready to broadcast yourself and the book everywhere.

  • Do you have a website ready with your own personal branding? If not, it’s time you had yourself branded by a professional. Consider creating another website devoted entirely to the book. Both of these need to be reviewed or created so you are ready to promote once that fabulous book is ready.
  • Be sure to create a new Facebook page with the title of your book. This can either be its own separate page, or it can be a custom page under your current author page.
  • Start creating advance Facebook, Google+ posts and Tweets using hashtags you will be using regarding the new book. (such as: #harrypotter)
  • Create a Pinterest board for the new book, so you can post graphics, photos, and video once on tour.
  • Make sure to post video of signings, talks, and events to your YouTube channel, and if the YouTube channel isn’t branded, do it.
  • Have you created a Kindle version? An audio version?
  • Perhaps a great time to add audio and create your podcast station? (Talkshoe, Blog Talk Radio)
  • Make sure your Twitter and Google Plus accounts are branded also with the correctly sized graphics.
  • Create other print marketing that you can give to others at events or to help in promotion, such as: bookmarks, flyers, postcards, magnets, business type cards but for the book, perhaps with a special discount code?
  • Figure out which pages of the interior you will use to showcase the book in the pop-up section on Amazon.
  • Be sure the cover looks good when reduced down to a postage stamp, as well as blown up really large. Have an assortment of cover graphics sized properly for every type of usage.
  • Send out a press release about the new book with links to all the web presence pages.
  • Send advance copies to a group of influential people who will write reviews for the book on amazon and social media as well as for your website. Share those on social media too.
  • Review your LinkedIn profile and all other profiles and make sure all content is up to date and all new links are added in.

Here are a few examples I found of celebrated authors and their branded websites.

anne rice website design - branding authors

JK Rowling website design - Branded Authors

Kurt Vonnegut website design - Branding Authors

Tom Wolfe website design - branded authors

Brand Visibility: What Makes YOU Unique and Using Those Terms For SEO

March 31st, 2013 | Posted in Blog, Brand Visibility, Branding, Design, marketing, Smart Business Practices, Social Media, Website Design and Development | 3 Comments
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creating tags unique to you for seoMost branding experts agree that the road to broadcasting your brand and creating brand visibility is figuring out exactly what makes you stand out from the crowd. What makes you different.

Instead of just classifying yourself as a coach, salesperson, author, or artist and lumping yourself into the millions of others who say that same thing, let’s begin by fine-tuning and get back in touch with the YOU only you know.

Make a list of all the words that define you. I do not mean your role at your job, I mean you, personally. No one has had your exact life or has learned what you have. No one has all your interests and learned the specialties just the way you have.

Once you have written all those words down, look them over and start putting some of them together to create phases that will be unique to you.

For myself, when I did this exercise it went something like: Singing, branding, techno geek, animal lover, environmentalist, creative, lover of all things Italian, Yankee fan! So now I’ve created a few long-tail keyword phrases from this such as, branding techno geek, creative Yankee fan, or animal lover and environmentalist. Now if I take that a step further to combine some of this with my work, I might get phrases like, singing branding designer, Italian speaking environmentalist helping frogs, or brand visibility gadget loving techno geek.

My passions are what define me and make me different from you, just like my DNA and fingerprints are not like anyone elses.

Now you try this exercise. What are you passionate about and how do you do it differently than someone else? Once you have that created, you can implement those concepts into your posts and add those keywords and then watch what happens!

For more Brand Visibility Tips, watch my video tutorial series on Udemy.

Gender Specific TV Commercials During Justified on FX – Reaching the Right Target Audience is the Key!

March 13th, 2013 | Posted in Blog, Branding, Design, Events, marketing, Smart Business Practices, Social Media, Website Design and Development | 4 Comments
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Last night I was watching “Justified,” the TV series with star Timothy Olyphant, like I do most tuesday evenings. Most likely the advertising agency for this program thinks the audience is 99% male and in researching on Mediawiki, I discovered I was right.

Timothy Olyphant Justified Season 4 - 2013

From Mediawiki: “FX’s covets men in the 18-49 age range as their target audience. Their promotional techniques and the subject matter in their shows appeal directly to this demographic. FX features a late-night programming block called Fully Baked. It runs Louie, Archer, and other original comedy series. The vulgar humor intertwines pop culture references, drugs and sexual innuendos that appeal to an immature, hip audience. As the title implies, the humor especially suits those who smoke pot. The Fully Baked programming block seems to say, “Up late? High? Why not watch some FX comedy? It’s just what you need when you’re baked.” FX advertises Coors Light, a popular beer for inexperienced and underage drinkers, as well as Call of Duty, an obsession of male youth culture. FX also found airing blockbuster films attracts their desired target audience.”

Now you may be wondering what it is that I like about the show, if it’s supposed to be for men? Well, it’s a combination of a love for the old westerns, which I watched with my brother and dad years ago and more recently was a huge fan of the HBO series Deadwood which also starred Olyphant as a lawman.

So, since I am not in their target audience, I found it interesting to watch the commercials they broadcast. I wasn’t interested in what they were selling at all. Should they have thought about whether or not there were others outside of their target market that they should be selling to. No,  you should always stay true to exactly who you are trying to reach.

This brings me to a joint venture I’m working on with Catrice M. Jackson, Master Brand Game Plan. This has been an eye opening adventure. We have created an exclusive playbook and our target market to teach our 6 classes to are men who want to sell to women. We are going to give them the data we have uncovered from asking women what they want, as well as give them our best branding and marketing strategies so they can clearly send the exact right signals to get the results they want.

Learning how to advertise what someone else is specifically looking for is the key to success. This is why those commercials didn’t interest me, but did interest 99% of the other viewers, who most likely buy those products and watch those shows.

Baseball Encyclopedia: Original Book Design vs Today’s Web Only Version

March 12th, 2013 | Posted in Blog, Books, Branding, Design, marketing, Smart Business Practices, Social Media, Website Design and Development | 2 Comments
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A funny thing happened today… I was reminded about the way things used to be.

Many years ago I was given the task of creating a brand new look to the infamous “Baseball Encyclopedia.” In my mind I wanted to move far away from the old versions that were just blue, red or green and do something fresh and exciting. As an art director at the old Macmillan, I conceptualized the line-up of bats to be displayed and engaged the photographer, Jim Cornfield to shoot the image. Then I decided on Todd Radom, who’s iconic baseball logos I’d admired for many years, to create the typography.

In showing the “comp”of the new cover to the publisher, he was thrilled and scared at the same time. Would the old fans recognize it and buy it, or would they walk past it in the stores? He was on the phone right away, getting sales and marketing into the room to discuss this new look. I sat on the couch and listened in for the next 20-30 minutes. Round and round they went until it was decided, the cover was great and they were ready to stand behind it. So, then I called the photographer and told him, now I want a shot of baseballs for the back and so we had it.

Baseball Encyclopedia

I remember Todd telling me one time he was walking past a bookstore and seeing a whole wall of the books! I wish I had a photo of that now. That book jacket was done in 1993.

Today someone emailed me to tell me they thought they saw the book in a movie they were watching. So Todd and I started discussing it today and after looking on the web, it looks like the last edition was published in 1996 and had a CD included. There has not been a new edition since then? The details are only on a baseball stats website now, and by the look of it, all about stats, there’s no creative design here.

Todd Radom: “To me it’s a different side of the brain thing. This probably applies to most data-driven folks, right? Although students of baseball have a defined appreciation for the visual history of the game.”

So, should we assume that those “geeks” that are just interested in stats, don’t care what web design looks like? What do you think?

WordPress No-No’s: Custom Theme Rules for Clients

February 6th, 2013 | Posted in Blog, Branding, Design, marketing, Smart Business Practices, Website Design and Development | Comments Off
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WordPress is a marvelous CMS platform for both web designers and business owners. However, once a custom theme WordPress site is completed by the designer/developer and passed over to the client and administrator, there need to be a few rules to follow.

Wordpress No-No's

1- Remember that you have a custom theme with custom CSS and you should not touch the (Appearance >> Themes) area, unless you want to change the theme completely.

2- Just because certain plugins alert you they have new versions available, doesn’t mean you should just automatically update. The web developer may have custom coded these plugins, so definitely ask first.

3- WordPress itself alerts you when new versions of the software are available, and you have to be careful about just clicking on that update as it may effect many different parts of your site, the theme may be thrown off whether  a custom design or an inexpensive/free wordpress theme and may not be compatible nor function right. If you have a shopping cart installed it may also need to be updated.

4- When a designer creates your custom theme and has a vision of style, color palette and typography, don’t just add whatever colors and font sizes you feel like throwing in, it will look bad and savvy web visitors will wonder what you were thinking.

5- Your custom theme may have size perimeters, so make sure you have sized, optimized, and named those images before you add them to your pages and posts. This is true for embedded video too.

6- Your website/blog content can only be found if you add strong keyword-rich titles, short descriptions and long-tail keywords.

7- Depending on how often you blog, it’s a good idea to download, approximately once a month, an XML file as a backup of your posts and pages. (Tools >> Export). Through your hosting, creating a backup of the site is a good idea too.

8- If you have imported blog posts from another WordPress blog, do not take down that other blog or those posts will disappear.

9- If you aren’t a savvy WordPress user and are intimidated by your new site, ask for guidance. Either watch video tutorials or hire someone to tutor you.

10- Don’t just put your site up and leave it untouched for ages. A site should be a growing content-rich space where others continue to visit to learn and see new things.

11- If you are a creative and have galleries, make those galleries as easy for visitors to view, such as a single image at a time, with a slider underneath. If you prefer thumbnails, then when we click on an image, one pops up above the page and you can turn to view the rest.

12- Make sure that you have protection installed for your site. Especially to guard against the you-know-who’s. I won’t even say that word.

13- When you add a new page, check to see if your theme is using “menus” because this area will need to be updated if you want that new page in the navigation.

14- Before you install new plugins, be sure you don’t already have one doing the same thing or there will be a conflict.

15- Hopefully your programmer installed the “Google Analytics” code and you have your “permalinks” set on month/day, or something similar, rather than the numbered default pages. This way you can track the stats of your pages and posts on Google Analytics and learn more about your visitors.

Another important tip!

16- If you are going to hire a VA (virtual assistant) and you’re asking them to blog for you, but you don’t know exactly what  web development level they have it’s best to not give them full access as an administrator, but instead as an “author” or “contributor.” Below are the definitions:

Administrator
An administrator has full and complete ownership of a blog, and can do absolutely everything. This person has complete power over posts/pages, comments, settings, theme choice, import, users – the whole shebang. Nothing is off-limits, including deleting the entire blog.

Only one administrator per blog is recommended!

Editor
An editor can view, edit, publish, and delete any posts/pages, moderate comments, manage categories, manage tags, manage links and upload files/images.

Author
An author can edit, publish and delete their posts, as well as upload files/images.

Contributor
A contributor can edit their posts but cannot publish them. When a contributor creates a post, it will need to be submitted to an administrator for review. Once a contributor’s post is approved by an administrator and published, however, it may no longer be edited by the contributor.

A contributor does not have the ability to upload files/images.

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If you need guidance, I have a WordPress video tutorial series >> “10 WordPress Video Tutorials.” If you have any questions, just let me know in the comment section below. If you are a savvy WordPress user and wish to add some more rules that will guide others, I’ll welcome that too! Happy blogging!

Web Design is Tricky Business – Adding Mobile Device Design

January 23rd, 2013 | Posted in art, Blog, Branding, Design, marketing, Smart Business Practices, Social Media, Website Design and Development | Comments Off
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First, I applaud all the great web designers out there. I know you don’t get enough credit for what you do.

Now to get down to why web design (lately) is tricky business.

I have been designing web sites for 15 yrs now and each time I begin a new project I need an assortment of details to do my job right.

The client has to be interviewed, answering some key questions, such as:

  • Can you tell me about your company, your goals and aspirations?
  • Who is your exact target audience? Let’s talk demographics…
  • Have you seen some direct competitors you’d like to share with me?
  • Are there websites out there you’ve seen that you like?
  • Do you have a brand identity and marketing materials already printed you can share?

Mobile vs Desktop - responsive web design
When I’m designing… I must wear three hats at once. I’m creating a website that I like, my client will like, and the exact target audience will like, but it goes much deeper than that. I’m also loading all the elements needed, such as their logo, testimonials from happy customers, opt-in for email marketing, social media icons, copylines and headlines, photos or artwork, video and more. Then I must work to make sure that each element needed is seen by the eye in exactly the order I want the visitor to view it. Leading them by the hand to go and click where I’ve directed them to, all while making sure the page loads instantly and catches their attention in 3-5 seconds flat.

So many times I’m looking at my layouts and moving items around, changing colors even if ever so slightly, always keeping in mind who the target visitor is and being sure my client is thrilled at the outcome.

Today, even if your a pro at this, our technology is changing constantly and now we must think “responsive web design.” This means we are designing not just for the web on a wide screen monitor or laptop, but for mobile devices. Are we to rethink everything we’ve learned or do we just design additional versions now for alternate devices?

Two weeks ago I attended a free seminar at Noble Desktop on “Responsive Web Design” which was very informative and I learned a lot about how to think iphone and ipad, but I’m not sure I could start a web design thinking simplistic elements and then build on that. I think instead I’d create an alternate more simplified version after the larger one.

So, I’m asking the web designers out there, how will you address mobile devices in addition to desktop versions as we move forward?

SEO and Google: 4 Successful Tips for Brand Visibility in the New Year

December 31st, 2012 | Posted in Blog, Branding, marketing, Smart Business Practices, Social Media, Website Design and Development | 4 Comments
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I’m going to start 2013 off by revealing a few of my SEO secrets with the hope that you will implement these into your own websites and online profiles and start the new year off right!

***Most important point.*** What matters is what others search for, not what you think they will search for.

SEO and Google: 4 Successful Tips for Brand Visibility in the New YearTip #1: Go to the Google Keyword Search tool and type in your profession and write down some of the top search words. Type in some key terms that make you unique and see how they do. Next, go to the regular Google.com search page and type in the words you’ve written down, first search separately, then search by combining a few of them. See what pages and websites come up and see what they have on their homepage that is making them the answer to your query. Also take note of where they are located and if they are using those choice words with their location as well.

Now you are ready to start thinking like a savvy web user and implement a few things into your own site and online profile.

Tip #2: Create your title or moniker that combines what you do with what makes you unique and then stick with it. Make sure that everywhere you have a profile, on your website, social media pages and community sites, it echoes that same phrase. For example: I have decided from now on, my title is “Brand Visibility Designer.” To me, this encompasses a wide spectrum of what I offer and doesn’t box me in. You’ll see that everywhere you see me on the web, this title is accompanying me.

Tip #3: Blogging and SEO. If you write a new blog post and you aren’t making the post SEO friendly, you’re wasting precious time and energy. Write your post first, then read it a few times to see if any words or phrases can be more SEO worthy, and then lastly make sure your title is using some of those attractive keywords to draw people in. If you are adding video and/or imagery they also need to be titled correctly and keywords added. If you’ve just started doing this but have tons of old posts that are missing SEO, go back and add it in.

Tip #4: Be sure to post on your website, update pages and share news as often as possible so all your profiles and pages are fresh. If you do not, you will be less likely to be the answer when someone searches. And since you do want to be the answer, realize how important this task is, and post!

Facebook Graphics and Custom Pages Must Be Done Right

December 14th, 2012 | Posted in art, Blog, Branding, Design, marketing, Social Media, Website Design and Development | Comments Off
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Posting graphics and pages when you aren’t a designer or developer and having them look bad is a poor reflection on your business. I understand wanting to change your custom pages and cover image in order to gain “likes.” But if you try to design Facebook graphics or web pages yourself, or are having your virtual assistant create them when they aren’t qualified and they are badly done and the pages are being called from your website and the sizes are too big, what do visitors think?

I can tell you. They’ll think you’re going cheap by not having them created properly. Period.

The Facebook profile image, cover image, buttons and inside custom pages all have their exact sizes.

Why Facebook is an Economical Way To Lure Customers
Someone has put in a search query on Facebook for a coach, interior designer or a bakery and it will show the top Facebook and other results. If that company has a page and custom pages set up, the graphics/content can speak directly to this new visitor and tell them about their company and why they should “like” it. Once they like the company, they move on to read your posts & information, view your gallery pages or other special pages, or a store if you’ve loaded one.

You can also create a special landing page on your website or blog and set the custom page’s link to go to that page, however it must be the right width or it won’t display correctly. Set it up for Facebook users and offer them something special, that the general public doesn’t see on your website. So your page is speaking directly to them, and is offering them a discount or special download.

How to Attract People and Get Them Sharing
So you have created a company page, added your custom imagery for buttons, profile and cover image, and a custom page and now you want to attract new potential customers or clients. I suggest starting a Facebook ad campaign which is an inexpensive way to drive people to your new Facebook page. This ad or promoted post can be a modest budget of $5-10 a day or you can spend more. You can create a few different ads and review the stats after a few days or a week later to see which ads are working and which aren’t. You can pause an ad and start new ones.

Facebook Cover Images, Buttons and Profile Graphics Working Together
Most people have fun changing up their personal profile image and cover shot, like I do, but when we’re talking about your company page, there should be a specific approach. The profile image is usually your logo, but must be created on a perfect square to look right. In some cases you can still use your own headshot if your company is known by you. The cover image should be representative of your business goals so when someone arrives they get what you do right away. I’ve also seen some cover shots that show customers using the products. The goal is to accomplish what you set out wanting which is “likes” and followers. We also have the little buttons which can be designed and take visitors to your custom pages/apps.

Set it Up and then Leave It?
As a designer and an active social media small business owner, it’s very important to my “brand visibility” to be active on all social media websites. So, it pains me when a client hires me to set it all up, and then doesn’t do anything afterward. I monitor their pages and see no activity. This is so important to gaining new eyes on your business. You don’t have to commit as much time as me, but get in there and add new posts at least one time a day. If you want to grow your business, you MUST be active!

Below are a few examples of Facebook Cover images, profiles, buttons and a custom page. Visit my other site at Susan Newman Design to see more examples/links.

Also here’s a great guest article written by Louis Tanguay, managing director of Circle Marketing: Why Facebook “Doesn’t Work” for Your Business

Peter Balsam Associates Facebook Cover Image

Prospector's Run Facebook Cover and Profile Image Interact

Prospector's Run Freebies Custom Facebook Page

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