Trends quickly come and go in logo design, which can leave your corporate identity looking dated almost before it’s rolled out.

It’s easy to say, “I don’t follow trends”, but with so many internal and external influences surrounding us, how can we honestly say we’re not affected by what others are doing?

Here’s a LogoLounge article on 2007 trends. I’m not too keen on most of those logo designs, but I can’t say I’m not going to use the ideas for inspiration. They can just as easily tell me what to do, as they can what not to do, so it’s all about gathering information. The more you know, the more suitable you are to provide a result that works for an individual situation. It’s like design research. You don’t create a new logo design without compiling research on the company you’re designing for.

Just because you don’t like a certain style of logo, does that mean you should simply say, “That’s no good”, and move on?

I don’t think so. The alternative is to take stock of what’s happening in the logo design world, to see how people are communicating, and to gain an insight into different ideas and concepts.

For me, it’s all about finding out what I believe works, and using it to my advantage.
Do you follow logo design trends?

I’d like to know your thoughts on this. If you’re a designer, do you follow trends? Do you create your own style? Can you create your own style without following trends?

Gathering Information

Before you get started it’s important to know the specifics of what you want to achieve:

1. Name of the service/product
2. Will a slogan be used?
3. What color scheme do you have in mind?
4. What are you trying to convey through the logo?
5. Any other specifics?

DO IT YOURSELF: Design your own awesome logo with this 5 step tutorial!

On December 1, Webster’s New World Dictionary announced “overshare” as 2008’s Word of the Year.

Former editor of Gawker.com, Emily Gould first popularized the word overshare in New York Times Magazine article- Exposed. That column sparked a massive public debate with a small army of bloggers trying to judge the value of intimate personal blogging.

View Emily Gould discussing the consequences of her oversharing and the massive reaction to her New York Times Magazine article in Digital Age interview Do Bloggers Overexpose Themselves?

Geekcentric’s Michael Duff refers to the battle between fans of artistic personal disclosure and the people who hate it, as ‘the overshare war’.

And posts this question … “where’s the line between sharing and oversharing? If I publish a detailed first-person account of a fight with my family in a novel, I can win awards and get touted in the New Yorker. If I do the same thing on a blog, I’ll be condemned as a narcissistic oversharing hack. What’s the difference?”

“Oversharing may look like a fad, but I believe it represents a larger cultural shift. The baseline of our public discourse is changing. Readers have grown suspicious of press releases and corporate doublespeak, particularly after what’s been done to our economy,” says Duff. Read The Overshare War

Watch Webster’s Editor-In-Chief Mike Agnes’s explanation of why ‘overshare’ was selected as word of the year, plus real life examples of oversharing and its consequences, from passersby in Washington Square Park, NYC.

Do you overshare?

We want to hear from you … leave a link in the comment box to an oversharing post. Do you undershare? What does that mean, I hear you think. If you share about what you had for breakfast, taking the kids to school, or any other snore material, you better let us know where you are!

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Does your blog make you money? In lightning speeds, blogs have gone from self-indulgent hobbies to income producing businesses, attracting healthy revenue streams from advertisers.

Boing Boing, a four-person operation that bills itself as a directory of wonderful things, is on track to gross an estimated $1 million in ad revenue this year. The digital-media news site PaidContent.org, headquartered in the second bedroom of a Santa Monica apartment, is set to post even more than that. And Fark.com, a site packed with sophomoric humor run by a lone guy in Lexington, Ky., is on pace to become a multimillion-dollar property. In short, some of the most popular blogs, long the bane of the mainstream media, are themselves becoming mainstream.

What has changed?

For starters, blogs today benefit from what might be termed uneconomies of scale: They are so cheap to create and operate that a lone blogger or a small team can, with the ever-expanding reach of the Internet, amass vast audiences and generate levels of profit on a per-employee basis that traditional media companies can only fantasize about.

At the same time, advertisers shunning old-line media in favor of the Web, are discovering the unique power of blogs. Blogs offer a personal touch in the mediascape; small sites have become our guides to a content-saturated world. As such, their recommendations are highly valued by readers–which naturally has made advertisers take notice.

In recent months, big-name companies like Banana Republic and Coca-Cola (Charts) have for the first time run campaigns on blogs, in the belief that blog communities often consist of concentrated numbers of the passionate and influential people all marketers want to reach. Intel bought its first blog ad in March; now all its ads run on blogs as well as traditional outlets. Says Thom Campbell, head of media strategy for Intel (Charts), “The audience on blogs is the cream of the crop.”

Blogging-for-dollars phenomenon is only in its infancy, and already blog ad spending is roughly twice what it was last year. With overall Web advertising expected to grow by 50 percent to $23.6 billion in 2010, it’s certain that more and more ad dollars will land on blogs. For a growing cadre of bloggers, the opportunities to score fat profits from pumping out posts on whatever their particular passions might be are widening and one consequence could be a radical reshaping of our notions of how to build a successful media company.

The monetization of blogging can trace its roots to late 2002, when Google (Charts) created a revolutionary system that allowed anyone with a website to run ads. The technology, called AdSense, matched ads with a site’s content. Each time a visitor clicked on a linked ad, the site’s owner got paid (a model now referred to as cost-per-click advertising). For the first time, anyone could be a real publisher with real advertisers, with no need for the big sales forces that magazines, newspapers, and other traditional media employ.

For do-it-yourselfers, however, the revenue stream created by AdSense in its early days was for the most part simply beer money. At the same time, display ads - the banners, buttons, and skyscrapers that had fallen into disfavor with the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000, began to make a comeback on major destination sites such as Yahoo (Charts) and MSN. Marketers pay for those kinds of ads based on a formula known as CPM, which stands for cost per 1,000 impressions.

The promise of these two Web advertising models whet the whistles of wannabe publishers, and among the first was Nick Denton. He bet that he could run sites as low-cost one or two-person operations and offer advertisers ready-made, easily targeted niche audiences. He reasoned that he could eventually one-up automated systems by handselling display ads for his sites at premium CPMs. But to lure advertisers into uncharted blog waters, he initially gave away ad space for free.

Denton launched his company in New York in 2002 with the media gossip site Gawker and the gadget blog Gizmodo. Gawker Media now runs 13 sites, including such edgy titles as Defamer and Wonkette. Denton recently announced that he’s “battening down the hatches” and selling two sites, but his core properties are on a tear: Gawker Media sites clocked 66 million pageviews in June, more than double the traffic they saw a year earlier. Denton won’t discuss financial details, but industry experts estimate that Gawker Media will bring in as much as $3 million in revenue this year.

All the while, big-picture changes have been unfolding in the background, Google engineers have made AdSense a more powerful placer of more-varied and better-targeted ads; AdSense alone is expected to generate sales of $4 billion this year.

At a more fundamental level, the Web has become deeply embedded in our daily lives, for business and pleasure, in ways no advertiser can ignore. Today 71 percent of American households have Web access; Americans ages 13 to 24 now spend more time online than they do in front of the TV.

As for blogs, they’ve exploded: There are 50 million of them, and two new ones are launched every second, according to blog search engine Technorati. To some experts, all these developments mean but one thing. “This time, Web advertising is for real,” concludes Karen Francis, CEO of San Francisco-based ad agency Publicis & Hal Riney. “And marketers are all looking for new opportunities online.”

Journalist Mark Frauenfelder founded Boing Boing, then a paper-based cyberpunk zine, in 1988 and took it online in 1995. Four years later he accepted a freelance assignment to write what became one of the first stories about blogs and afterward decided to turn his zine into one. He discovered the power of building traffic by “deep linking” to specific stories or items on other sites. Other bloggers would return the favor, and the community grew. “I was getting a thousand visitors a day, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s fun,’” Frauenfelder recalls.

Eventually he discovered that the more posts Boing Boing put up, the more traffic grew; he recruited three friends to keep the posts coming hot and heavy. By 2004 the site had 20,000 visitors a day, rivaling many mainstream magazine sites. But the team was spending about a thousand bucks a month in Web hosting fees. That’s when Frauenfelder called Battelle, a former colleague, and began selling ads for the site. Today, Boing Boing’s roughly 325,000 daily visitors make it the most lucrative property in Battelle’s stable. Though not all of Boing Boing’s ad inventory is sold, the site will gross more than $1 million this year, based on CPMs and traffic. “It’s turned out to be a good business,” Frauenfelder says.

But Battelle believes an eccentric blog called Fark.com, a collection of reader-submitted links to amusing videos, jokes, and curiosities from all over the Web, could become the most profitable site in mainstream blogdom. Already it vies with FM stablemate MetaFilter for the top spot in blog traffic rankings. Fark founder Drew Curtis made up the site’s offbeat name as code for the real F-word when posting in chat rooms in the early 1990s. In 1993, while a student in England, Curtis began sending e-mail messages to friends back home with weird items he found in the news. In 1999 he decided to post them on a webpage.

Fark is incredibly cost-efficient: Almost all of its content is generated by its readers, and aside from Curtis it has just two contract employees, both tech guys. Fark devotees post links to news items accompanied by rubrics like “spiffy” and “dumbass,” annotate them with blurbs of text, and open them up for comment. Controversial items about politics, religion, or sex ignite all-out flame wars and, naturally, boost traffic, which overall stands at 40 million pageviews a month. The beautiful part is that virtually none of the content (pictures, videos, etc.) is hosted on Fark, which simply links to the goodies. This means that, despite its huge traffic, Fark doesn’t incur the crushing bandwidth fees that eat into profit at sites like video trove YouTube.

Without a dedicated sales force, however, Curtis had trouble drawing mainstream advertisers. That changed after News Corp. (Charts) purchased MySpace and AOL bought Weblogs, moves that only boosted advertiser interest in blogs. “That hit like a hammer,” Curtis says. Within days of the Weblogs sale, Curtis inked a deal with his first major advertiser, the National Hockey League. Curtis recently signed on with Battelle’s FM and cut a side deal with Dennis Digital, a division of Maxim magazine’s publisher. Dennis approached Curtis because Fark’s audience demographic matches Maxim’s. Curtis won’t disclose his current revenue but insists that he can soon log monthly ad sales of $600,000 to $800,000. Battelle expects Fark to become the first indie blog to earn a million dollars a year in profit. “Fark’s going to get there,” he says.

How To Blog for Money

Watch this space over the next coming weeks, as we introduce easy, basic techniques to start a blog and turn it into a money producing site.

For many people, a new year provides an opportunity for reflection and a chance to start a fresh page in their lives. The same holds true in business as companies roll over to a new set of goals.


How can you take advantage of the brief lull between the holiday frenzy and upcoming seasonal promotions? For those of you who didn’t just answer “Take a vacation,” here are 8 practical tips that will help you put your best foot forward in the New Year.

1.  Reflect on the Past Year: What Worked? What Didn’t?

Take some time to step back and examine how you did this past year. There are two important questions to ask yourself when conducting this review: What worked well for me? and What could I have done better? Are there any areas of your business that were neglected? Take a look at your actual performance for the year and compare it to past performance data. Did you generate more sales this year than last year? Which categories saw an increase or decline? What about your EPC – has it improved in the last 12 months? What contributed to your successes, and how can you continue that success into the New Year? Ask yourself these questions and use the answers to improve your business in the coming year.

2.  Set Goals for Yourself: What Do You Want to Accomplish This Year?

Setting goals is one of the most important things you can do for your business. After reflecting on the past year, set some high-level goals for the coming year. Maybe you’d like to grow your overall sales by 10 percent. Maybe you’d like to establish 20 new advertiser relationships. Whatever your goals are, it is crucial to think carefully about them and record them in some way. Write them on a piece of paper and tape it to the side of your computer monitor. Create a document and set a reminder to review these goals once a month. Find a way to keep your goals top of mind.

3.  Gear up for Q1: Get Ready, Get Set, Go!

Once you’ve set some high-level goals for the entire year, it’s time to dig in and nail down your plans for the first quarter. Make sure you are geared up and ready to get off to a great start. Have you planned which advertisers you will promote in the coming months? Be sure to pay attention to advertisers in key categories that relate to consumers’ New Year’s resolutions, such as Dieting and Dating, and also to advertisers in the Tax category. Also, look ahead to some of the upcoming seasonal promotions such as the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day promotions.

4.  Plan Your Networking Events for the Year: It’s All About WHO You Know

Everyone knows that networking is a vital component of a successful business. As such, make it a priority to look at the calendar and plan out which industry events you would like to attend in the coming months. By planning in advance, you can save yourself some money on flights, accommodations and other travel expenses. And you’ll be able to look forward to events and prepare for them well in advance to make the most of each networking opportunity. Each event will enable you to establish, rekindle or solidify business relationships. Be sure to save a slot for CJU in the fall.

5.  Review Your Web Site: How Are You Benefiting From That Analytics Package?

Take a look at your Web analytics reports from the past year. If you don’t have any Web analytics for your site, this is a great opportunity to do a little homework and find a package you like. Google Analytics is a fairly popular package, and you can’t beat the price. If you already have some kind of analytics package installed, review the data and look for ways to improve your site. Are there certain pages that are converting better than others? Try to figure out what specific qualities are helping those pages convert and apply that information to improve other pages on your site. Are there other areas of your site that could use a little improvement? This is a great time to make those changes.

6.  Get Some Feedback: Reach Out to Your Site’s Visitors

If you are having trouble figuring out your next step or how you can grow your business, consider consulting the best resource you have – your site’s visitors. Reach out to your customers and ask them for feedback. Don’t expect them to give you a definitive answer, but their input can help steer you in a new direction. You can post a brief Web survey to ask them what they like or don’t like; or, you can contact users individually and try to get some more detailed feedback. Ultimately, these people are responsible for the success of your business, so it doesn’t hurt to cater to their needs, when you can.

7.  Promote Yourself: Try Something New

Your success depends on being able to bring visitors to your site. To that end, you can never do enough to promote yourself and your site. This is a great opportunity to test a new method of self-promotion. Take a stab at a paid search campaign. Try sending a newsletter to your users. Consider sending out a press release. Build out a page on a social network. There are countless ways to get your name out there; why not pick one and give it a try?

8.  Clean House in the CJ Account Manager: Is Your Information Up-to-Date?

Spend a few minutes reviewing all the information about your company in the CJ Account Manager. Verify that everything is accurate and up-to-date. This includes your contact information, address and payment information, as well as all the details for your various Web sites and promotional methods. While you’re in there, have a look at your Performance Reports and find any relationships that were unproductive (i.e., any advertisers for whom you generated no sales in the past year). Spend some time evaluating the relationships to ensure that you are not missing an opportunity and try to jump-start those that still have potential. Finally, consider removing non-responsive relationships to help you focus on your more productive ones. While this may seem mundane and non-critical, a few minutes spent on this now can save a hassle somewhere down the road.

You will inevitably be spending time relaxing with family and friends this holiday season, but don’t forget that next year is just around the corner. It’s never too early to start looking at new opportunities and planning for a successful year. We hope these 8 tips have given you some great ideas that will help you get off to a great start next year and make it your best year yet.

Optimized balance

What is SEO writing? SEO stands for search engine optimization. This niche involves writing content in a particular way to drive traffic to a website or blog.

A reader posed some interesting questions on optimized publishing, in particular - “How do you know when you’ve posted enough, and what’s the best strategy for generating traffic, without jeopardizing quality content?”

One of the sweet things about blogging is that there are no universally correct answers to how much content is right? If you utilize your blog as an online diary, chances are you’re not considering your audience or search engine optimization. If however, you’re aspiring to maintain problogger status two things must be factored into account before publishing a post:

• optimizing copy length and quality for search engines
• optimizing copy length and quality for reader experience

Jeopardize one, and it will be detrimental to your business. Optimization is a way of providing customer service and satisfaction, and search engines seek to provide this for the customers utilizing their search tools. As online publishers it’s important to view the reader and the search engine as customers and aim to please both!

It’s worth investing some time considering the following points before you hit the ‘publish’ button because, with write skill and blogging balance, there is no need to sacrifice optimization for either customer.

The latest general search indexing trends suggest that longer copy content is better than short, as search engines seek to index rich content. The obvious reason behind this is the competitive business between companies like Google and Yahoo, for example. Greater depth and quality content provides them with the means to keep their search customers coming back. Like off-line publications, on-line media seeks to satisfy their customers by giving them what they want.

Google algorithms look for natural writing styles, which is generally achieved with longer word count, rather than small hyper-focused content. In fact good copy content gets as much traffic for long tail keywords, as small meaningless hyper-focused pages. So increasingly, search engines are pushing publishers toward well approached, lengthier content rather than short pages filled with hyper-linked text that doesn’t deliver.

Having said that, DON’T add words for the sake of increasing length. Useless rambling and optimized self-opinion ie. content that does not allow a space for the reader to draw their own conclusions, will severely jeopardize your users experience.

When writing SEO content each word and sentence structure needs to carry the weight of meaning and purpose. Consider these factors for optimizing reader experience:

• Does your copy provide meaning and purpose - is it going somewhere?
• Will your reader be better informed if they invest time on your post?
• Do you aim to entertain or enlighten your reader - have you achieved this?

A problog will usually have the reader better positioned as a result of investing their time reading the content; and it will do so without long endless rambling. Put bluntly - if you bore the crap out of your reader or don’t give anything of value, they won’t come back.

While some ideas take more words to express than others, strike a balance between lengthy copy for search engines and word count that holds the attention of the reader. Consider why word length is important when an editor commissions articles for a magazine: it has less to do with budget and more to do with the attention span of the reader, and their available time for reading.

Before publishing, edit your copy several times, omitting useless words and pointless ranting and raving. To help you achieve this read Editors tips:

• Cut the fat
• No one cares what you think!

Stick to short, snappy posts that inform without the reader being required to think too much.

You will either hook or loose your reader within the first two to three paragraphs of your post, so it’s vital to make sure you have a good intro to your article. Ideas on how to achieve this can be found at Editors tips:

• Are you leading me on?

A problog usually strikes a good balance between optimizing search, whilst avoiding boredom, by posting between 500 - 1000 words. While this is not a hard and fast rule, large media publishing companies have invested a lot of time and money into research on word count that works.

• What Is Freelance SEO Writing?

Do you have an article on SEO content? You do! That’s great, why not share it, post a link to your article in the comments box below.

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