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Brand identity is probably the most critical element of retail and business design. As a packaging designer you must be able to offer branding services as part of your design services package. Brand identity is the overall graphic representation that people will associate with a company or product.

In todays market, competition for customers is fierce, so you can see why a strong brand identity is crucial for companies.

Business owners rely on design professionals to invest time into researching, defining, and ultimately building a brand that people can trust. One could say that branding is the foundation of your design and marketing campaign.

For graphic designers who are new to building brand recognition this article will highlight the research process that experienced designers who are successful at building brands will implement in their graphic approach before offering up any directions. When building brands it’s not simply a matter of creativity it’s a matter of doing the right research.

Whether you’re branding a product or a company you will need to put in a good amount of time doing research.

Ask yourself some key questions such as:

* What kind of company are you trying to establish a graphic representation for?
* Who are their clients?
* What is the company’s target demographic?
* What services do they provide, etc.?

The same applies to product branding.

* What kind of product is it?
* Is the product targeted at males or females and what age group?
* How should the product be associated with the company that is selling the product?

Once you’ve collected your preliminary data from your initial questions, filter through and analyze your information to really hone in on your target audience. The ultimate goal of branding is to speak directly to your target audience in order to motivate them to action. In order to do this you better be sure that your target market is clearly defined.

Establishing your target market means identifying who your audience is specifically. To help you find out who your target audience is exactly ask questions like:

* Where is my audience located geographically?
* What colors should be associated with the product or company?
* Who is my brands direct competition?
* What elements have made my competition successful?
* Who are my competitors targeting?

You can do a large amount of this investigating on line. The more accurately you can assess your target market the more effective your brand will be.

If you spend enough time properly researching answers to your questions you will find that you have provided yourself with a guide to direct your creativity in the design process.

Remember, every element of your design is something that will be associated with the business or product you are branding. These elements should evoke emotion, create a reaction, and will not only define the company but be a part of it for as long as it exists.

These may seem like very simple questions, but the trick is making sure that you spend the time to answer them properly.

Many designers throw the term branding around without a true understanding of what that term means or how effective branding is accomplished.

A strong brand builds relevance, credibility and establishes trust. A strong brand speaks to your target market – it motivates customers to act. When done correctly it establishes the company or product as an industry leader.

By answering a few core questions you will be provided with a system of guides to help direct you when it comes to the actual design process. This is your map to an effective brand.

Nearly all internet marketing professionals use video as one of the core methods for marketing their business. These ten tips aim to help you get started creating short, attractive, effective videos based on solid keywords that convert and that stand the test of time.

Video grabs people’s attention far more quickly and effectively than text, audio or photographs. Making a short video can capture a thousand words and pictures and helps to get across your personal brand and lifestyle.

It’s important to stand out in the crowd on video channels and search engines. Aim your headlines at capturing the imagination regarding your topic. So don’t be dull – test out curiosity, shock or fun tactics for getting those download clícks.

First of all, get set up.

When you’re starting out, it’s ok to just use your webcam. It will give you the chance to practice while you’re honing your presentation skills before you fork out for a camcorder. When you’re ready, you can purchase an inexpensive digital video recorder, like say the Flip and a tripod.

Make sure you take your videos in well-lit conditions. Inside your office you’ll need decent lighting, or you can whip out your camera when you’re out and about. It makes for a much more interesting back drop.

OK. So now let’s go through each of my TOP 10 TIPS for creating and using videos to market your business.

#1: Keep Your Videos Short

Whether you’re loading videos on YouTube or just putting them up on your website or blog, it’s really important to keep to just 5 or 6 minutes.

If needed, you can of course break longer topics up into a series of smaller videos, which you could market as a series.

#2: Post Videos on Your Sales PagesM

You can use video on your sales page to introduce the main benefits of your product or business opportuníty. How about placing a video on your sales page or sign up pages.

This helps to orientate visitors and to highlight the main points of your regular, written sales letter.

#3: Choose Your Keywords Carefully

This is really an important tip, because it will affect how your video gets picked up by the search engines and other internet ‘bots’ that seek out content.

Research your top keyword phrases. Pick keywords that will attract the right kind of traffic and leads – research like crazy to find out what your prospects are looking for – and be sure to include your keywords in headings and tags and description boxes.

Doing this research and tracking clíck thrus (CTR) and conversions will help you secure your most cost-effective keywords and keyword phrases.

#4: Have a Clear Purpose & Structure

Your keywords will help make sure you target your video on the right purpose before you start. Does your video answer the questions your visitors have in their heads when they’re searching for solutions. Make things crystal clear.

Stay on topic and give added value – unique value if possible – and your videos will convert much better for you. Write down a structure – a set of headings – for what you’re going to cover. Have a script if necessary.

You can mention any links that you have to another video specifically on that related topic.

#5: Look at the Camera

The aim here is to connect with your audience, both in the topic you choose and the content as well as in your communication style. Remember you are talking to people – real live people. What are their needs and wants, hopes and fears.

With regards to presentation, stick your líst of headings right next to the camera so you stay looking in the camera at all times, rather than looking away at a screen or down at your notes.

An authentic and honest video is far more valuable than a glossy TV like broadcast. So don’t worry if you’re not up to TV presenter standards. Just be yourself and enjoy the opportuníty to reach out to people in a different way than using text copy.

#6: Create a Clear Call to Action

You should create one very clear service and call to action. It’s very important that people know exactly what to do as a result of watching your video.

What is your most wanted response (MWR)? Don’t confuse visitors with lots of options and different offers. Focus on the single most wanted response.

Alternatively, you can put your video up next to a sign up box – linked to your emaíl marketing – and clearly ask them to opt ín, more than once. Provide an incentive, such as a free report or further video coaching resources.

#7: Encourage Comments on Your Video

One of the best things about video is that it’s a very personal, social medium. The more people that are talking about your video and passing it on, the more buzz you’ll create.

Visitors may return to your page to see who has commented since their last comment. There may accumulate a whole líst of tips that have been created by your niche community, prompted by your initial video post.

Just to cover the ground, lets go over what link building is quickly. Link building is the process of building backlinks to your site. The more backlinks (links from other sites to your site) a site has, the higher it ranks on the search engines. Link building therefore is a mission of all money makíng webmasters.

Link building methods have changed from time to time and a specific method that worked yesterday may not work today. This is due to changes in the industry over time and in some cases extreme abuse. If a specific link building method has been abused too much, then that method will not work anymore.

It is therefore very important to know which link building method works today so that you can spend your time in a most productive way.

There are many link building methods out there today that work with some working better than others. Below are some of the today’s popular links building methods:

Article Submission

If you are reading this article, then you know that you can publish your article in article directories. Not only do you gain backlinks to your site from your published articles (see bottom of this article), you will get some traffic as a bonus. Think of you reading this article. There might be many reading your published articles as well.

Article submission is a great way of building backlinks as it provides you with 100% relevant contextual backlinks that Google loves.

Directory submission used to work lot better before, but it is still a popular link building method that still works if done properly. How many directories are out there as of this date is anyone’s guess but one thing is certain: that most of the directories aren’t worth submitting to.

Google considers a Yahoo Directory link as a quality backlink so if you can afford and justify the cost, it is worth submítting to Yahoo Directory. Yahoo charges $300 for a yearly submission and there is no assurance that your site will be approved!

Directory Submission

DMOZ is another directory that is worth submitting to and can provide great benefit in your SEO campaign. It may take months to get the approval from DMOZ and the chance of getting approved is pretty slim. A lot of small directories use the DMOZ directory categories so getting listed with DMOZ would mean getting bonus listings on many other web directories.

Another good directory to submit to is the BOTW dírectory that costs $99 for a yearly submission and $299 for a permanent listing.

Other than the above, you should look for quality directories where you can submit your site. You can judge the quality of the directories by analyzing the number of sites listed, number of backlinks the directory has, PR, age of the directory, etc.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking worked like charm only a few months ago. If bookmarked on authority and quality bookmarking sites like Digg, Mixx, Propeller, etc, then you can still make good use of social bookmarking. Other than backlinks, social bookmarking also offers you some bonus traffic depending on where you submit to. If you can manage to put together or collect a good bookmarking site líst, then social bookmarking can still be a useful link building method.

Blog Commenting

This is a link building method where lots of spamming has already been done so to make the best of it, you need to work a little harder here. It is best to find quality blogs related to your category and make on-topic relevant comments. Not only do your comments add value to the blogpost, you now have a greater chance of getting your comment approved and your comments have greater chance of staying on those blogposts.

Press Releases

Submitting to press release sites can get you some backlinks as well. It is however hard to put together a líst of good press release sites that are worth submitting to. If a good líst can be managed, then this method can give some quality relevant backlinks as well.

Social Media and Web 2.0 Pages

There are a lot of quality social media and Web 2.0 sites where you can publish your articles for backlinks. You should write articles that are relevant to your site and publish them on these social media and Web 2.0 sites with your keywords hyperlinked to your site. Some of the authority sites are Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger, Wordpress.com, etc.

Social media and Web 2.0 links are very popular these days because they work great. They give quality, relevant contextual backlinks that Google and other major search engines love. There are lots of other link building methods out there, but if you can utilize the above ones to their fullest potential, there is no need for any other methods.

So you want to develop a Web video campaign to put on your website and add to YouTube and all the other Web video directories. Maybe you even want to create a new video micro site to promote that hot new product or service you’re about to launch. You want it done right, professional, slick, and you want it to be effective. Well of course you do.

You know you need to hire a firm that has the creative staff capable of not just shooting video but professionals who can write, direct, edit, and add all the post production elements you need, including signature music, sound design and on screen text. But are there other things you need to be aware of in order to maximize the return on your investment? You bet there are.

There are lots of production companies that just want to crank out the work at the lowest cost without providing any marketing guidance as to what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps these firms don’t know the difference or perhaps they just don’t care. The company you hire should be willing to provide some advice as to the best way to present your message so that it delivers the best return on your investment. Too many Web videos are technically proficient but lack any marketing impact. The last thing you want is a bland, boring, lifeless presentation that goes in one ear and out the other.

When you’re ready to add video to your marketing and sales tool kit make sure you avoid the following seven deadly video development sins.

Doing It Wrong – 7 Web Video Mistakes To Avoid

1. The need to get it all in.MM
everybody wants his or her money’s worth. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that as a general principle, but getting your money’s worth means more than hiring the cheapest bidder or cramming every possible product, service, benefit and feature into a single video.

You’re better off creating a series of shorter videos each about two to three minutes in length, and each focusing on a particular aspect or sales point. Ten minutes is generally the maximum you can hold someone’s attention, but it will be more effective if you break that ten-minute presentation into a series of shorter segments. By creating a presentation that flows from one focused video to the next, you lead your audience logically through a voyage of discovery that is far more interesting and memorable than a single over-stuffed information-onslaught that overwhelms the audience. Each video becomes an chance to re-enforce your marketing image and embed your brand personality by consistent use of color, style, format, and message.

2. The desire to appeal to everybody.
Whatever you sell, not everybody is going to purchase it. No matter how good your offering is there are people that you aren’t ever going to convince. We believe a properly implemented video presentation is the most effective method of delivering a marketing message, but no matter what the evidence, there are some people who just won’t buy into the idea. If you try to appeal to everybody you will end-up appealing to no one and you will waste a lot of time, money and effort in the process. Trying to appeal to everybody merely dilutes your message.

By concentrating on the most appropriate market segments allows you to fine-tune your message. And if you create a series of videos each highlighting a different aspect of your offering as described earlier, people will be able to pick and choose what they are interested in and what they want to watch. In this way your audience won’t get bored or frustrated by listening to things they may already know, or are just not interested in hearing.
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3. The fear of commitment.
Marketing is all about creating an identifiable, unique identity, a personality that people will recognize and remember: a brand. It’s what will set you apart from your rivals and give you a competitive edge; if done right, it’s the one thing your competitors can try to copy but won’t ever be able to duplicate.

Success requires a commitment to your brand image and to the marketing strategy from which it flows. Strategy is the big idea that guides everything related to your business, and it should not be confused with tactics. Tactics are the ways you implement strategy. If you confuse strategy and tactics, you will find yourself running in circles not accomplishing anything.

If you commit to and successfully target one market segment, you not only establish and enhance your brand image but you also create a ‘drag effect.’ For example, the success of Apple’s iTunes and iPods dragged their computer sales along with it. Once people became Apple customers for one product they were more likely to purchase another; and even though iPod advertising was originally aimed at a youth-oriented market, it’s success dragged both younger and older consumers along for the sales ride.
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4. The need to accommodate everybody’s agenda.
As companies grow they hire new people, and wherever there are groups of people there are opposing opinions, and opinions can very easily turn into agendas. Your sales people want lower prices, your accountant wants higher prices, and your advertising people want something new; everybody has an agenda and they all conflict with each other. The result is compromise. And compromise kills brand personality and corporate identity.

Even big companies with deep pockets and access to any and every expert in the world are susceptible to agenda creep. Take the fast food giant McDonald’s for example. Their television advertising is all over the place. They use different themes, different approaches, and even different music in almost every commercial, each aimed at a different market with a different product offering. The only thing that seems to be consistent is the logo and signature jingle that is slapped on to the end of each spot. As individual commercials they my stand up, obviously they have high production qualities but as a marketing message strategy they become mere advertising noise rather than building on each other to form a coherent approach and brand message. What they seem to want to say is that McDonald’s is for everybody no matter what age or food preference, and that kind of approach only leads to a muddled message. McDonald’s may get away with it in the short term because they are McDonald’s and have a long history of effective advertising. Whether McDonald’s simultaneous multiple campaign approach is the result of a desire to accommodate different agendas, or just designed to appeal to everybody doesn’t matter, the result is the same – muddled messaging.

5. The lack of vision.
And speaking of corporate identity, do you have one? Do you have a vision, a point-of-view, an attitude; a perspective on how you can best serve your clients. The idea of a corporate vision is something that is easy to ignore, after all, how much is a corporate vision worth? It’s not like you can go on eBay or Amazon and download one for a few bucks.

I recall seeing a documentary on a very successful clothing manufacturer. The founder of the company was reviewing the company’s latest line of running shoes. He looked at the shoes, looked at the product manager, and said, “Where’s the logo?” to which the product manager answered, “We can add it anywhere.” The company CEO in no uncertain terms told the executive that that wasn’t good enough. The logo represented the company and the company represented a particular lifestyle. The shoe being presented was just another shoe and that was not acceptable. The shoe needed to fit the ideal for which the company stood. The CEO had a vision and everything the company did had to conform to that vision. Developing and presenting a unified corporate vision is how you create a brand and how you build a business.

What happened with the Internet in 2009? How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way.

We have used a wide variety of sources from around the Web. A full list of source references is available at the bottom of the post for those interested. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get even more numbers to show you.

Email
* 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
* 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
* 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
* 100 million – New email users since the year before.
* 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
* 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
* 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
* 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites
* 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
* 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web servers
* 13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
* -22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
* 35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
* 384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
* -72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain names
* 81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
* 12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
* 7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
* 76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
* 187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
* 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users
* 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
* 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
* 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
* 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
* 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
* 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
* 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
* 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
* 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media
* 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
* 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
* 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
* 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
* 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
* 350 million – People on Facebook.
* 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
* 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Images
* 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
* 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
* 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Videos
* 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
* 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
* 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
* 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
* 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
* 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
* 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Web browsers
* 62.7% – Internet Explorer
* 24.6% – Firefox
* 4.6% – Chrome
* 4.5% – Safari
* 2.4% – Opera
* 1.2% – Other

Malicious software
* 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
* 2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
* 921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

In order to succeed and combat the competitive online world, you need to maintain a good reputation online. A good reputation does not only require a good website design but a lot more to build confidence, to grow sales and ultimately leads to better revenues and higher profitability.

In today’s Internet buzz nasty rumors, wrong opinions and incorrect news spread rapidly and if not taken timely action to handle the news properly, you may face a serious threat to your online business and credibility.

Here are some simple measures you can take to maintain your website’s reputation:

1. Respond to customers
Being open and responsive to customers is an important part of creating a positive impression and managing your website’s reputation. If someone asks you a question, answer it there or through e-mail. Be quick in addressing your customer issues before the word spreads.

2. Answer the negative comments humbly
Be real, not everyone is satisfied with your work and services. If these people are among the ones spreading negative comments about you for whatever reason like delayed service or unfriendly attitude, answer them instantly to terminate the issue right there!
Be very polite when putting your point of view in front of such people and you’ll sure succeed in saving your reputation. Answering negative remarks modestly can be a great way of turning a bad situation into positive one.

3. Create official online profiles
Create your own platform for users to share their experiences they’ve had with you. Create your own profiles and websites complete with the kind of information you actually want to be available about you. Let users communicate with each other and comment about your products or services, whether positive or negative.

4. Report stolen material from you
It’s very well possible that online competitors may steal material from your website to increase their ranking and traffic. This may lose your credibility among your users, making you “not-so-unique” in their eyes. To control such theft, you can report their site through strict action.

5. Write blogs
Writing blog posts are extremely effective in promoting your business. Through blog reviews and blog comments, you even increase your chance of getting high traffic volumes to your website.
If you or any of the experts in your business have important knowledge like instructions, guidelines, tips and trick that can be useful for the users, share them through writing blog posts, let say you write blog for “basic tips for web design”. This will greatly enhance your online reputation.

6. Optimize For Search Engines
Majority of the internet users accept results from Google searches or any other search engine as highly credible. Therefore, to maintain a good website reputation, don’t forget to optimize your website. You can consult professional search engine optimization services for this purpose.

7. Using the social media
Setting up social media networks in order to maintain your website’s online reputation is a great thought. To begin with, set up your profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace. Once you have your accounts setup, you will need to do the following things:

- Create a complete profile by putting all the information
- Engage and Interact with the members
- Monitor comments for both positive and negative remarks

You might have spend good time and money for your website design and building up your website’s good reputation, so it’s important not to let anyone drag it through the mud. Follow the above given tips to maintain your positive reputation among the online community.

When in the thoughts of producing a website, think hard on the some important key points you must deploy. Here some hints and tip that can help you to develop a good looking and profitable website.

1. Time is money, save both by managing and processing work carefully and logically. They say that an impression is made by the viewer in the first four seconds of reviewing a site. Thus it’s this time that you have to make a good impact on your reviewer.

To miss this opportunity only leaves you with a large amount of ground to catch up on. So, you have only four seconds to persuade your visitor to continue navigating around your website, otherwise they may well already be thinking of trying the next one.

2. Convenient and simple menu’s guide your users. When first they enter the site, they examine it and look for the all important navigation aids. Again, these are features that must appear very obvious and in clear sight, users must see everything they need simply classified on the shelves as they would expect to see them.

Once you have grabbed the user’s mouse pointer, they will have a desire to click further and drill down.

3. What is the most eye-catching place on a web page? It is a well recognized fact among web presenters that the upper-left corner is the most desirable position and it’s where the eye tends to sink to. Why is this so? This is natural as in European countries people usually start reading books or writing articles from this position.

Of course, it will appear different for those that are surfing from and Oriental or Middle Eastern country. Thus your target market has to be well thought out before selecting the information starting position. Thus most Western websites and applications are mainly designed from the up-left corner. Here you can place a logo or slogan, search box or any other piece of information that you feel would benefit from such a position.

4. Other psychological studies say that web information is in fact scanned in an “F” way. What does this mean? The top area is scanned horizontally, and the middle area and lower one is scanned only on the left side- vertically. So again please consider this research when arranging content for your website.

5. Another interesting fact is that of advertising. In the whole users deplore adverts and their eyes will ignore all of them just by association, remember the brain is a very fast processing device and scans the page without you thinking and has already decided very early on what an advert looks like and will ignore if it recognizes a pattern.

So again remember that people are busy and have just small amount of time to devote to finding what they need. So respect their time and be patience but plan the your advertising carefully and not too aggressively!

Do you think that images are more alluring than texts? You are possibly wrong, as sometimes word can seize you more attention that any bright graphic. So, if you want to deliver an important message to a person, use a slogan rather than a pretty image!

7. What else can grab users’ attention? Slogans, buttons, textual headlines…- they must be simple and bright and well thought out. Dirty childish graphics will turn people off very fast.

8. Text must be formatted in a proper way. Make it simple, understandable with continuity of size, font and color. Different fonts and sizes of letters, paragraphs, underlined, bold, italics and other means of word expression can help you but must be used sparingly and within the overall look and feel of the site.

9. People faces in graphics will catch the users’ attention. You can apply various ideas around this idea. especially if an image’s look is directed straight at the reviewer…

10. White spaces are a worthy and not well used device. It can provides a web page with the necessary air to breathe as well as giving space between the elements, so use wisely and your page will be worth reading…

Now you have some interesting facts and points you can follow.

In the existence of World Wide Web, people are maintain their websites or blogs with any informative information and tips about various kinds of subject. Aside from expressing and the intention of giving information to the readers, these people in blog spheres get revenue in a lot of ways. One of their income streams comes from Banner Advertising.

Banner advertising is found on different websites, rectangular in shape and relates on different subjects. This advertisement when clicked will be directed to the advertiser’s website. The opportunity of adding any income from this should not be taken for granted and should be acted on.

If you have a site and you giving information to all people globally. You may not initially intend to make revenue out of your given information, but once you realized that you already have your readers you will think of obtaining profit to maintain the cost of hosting your website and other expenses.

With banners advertised on your website, when the visitors click, it will direct them to the advertiser’s web site. This kind of process will surely give you a daily income. The more traffic your site has, the more clicks and profit you will have. It is proven that the best method to monetize website traffic is to sell advertising space on your website.

People use different search engines like Google to find relevant information. When they have got what they were looking for in your site, they will click it. There is no money without website traffic. With banner advertising, you need to have high amount of traffic to your website. And having this, you can join some banner networks and start making money.

Banner advertisements are becoming very popular on generating revenue. With banner ads, there is a sure income. The only requirement is to have high amount of traffic.