Don’t Be Nervous of Asking for Advice

If you’re self employed you’re probably used to doing a lot of things for yourself. Maybe you started out in business with a shoestring budget and had to do everything on your own because there was no real way of hiring anyone to help out in any way.

Whatever the situation might be, things may have changed. Once you get to the stage where your business is doing well and you have some surplus cash coming in, you should think about whether you could put that cash to good use. There are plenty of businesses that are still struggling on with the same old website they started out with – something the boss created on a Sunday afternoon maybe. Something that was only ever intended to suffice for a short time, but that is still here.

If this sounds familiar, don’t be afraid to reach out to someone who can help you take your business to the next stage. We help businesses all the time with all kinds of different things. It could be to help with revamping a website, it could mean designing a new logo, or it could mean a whole new rebranding exercise. But whatever happens, it usually stems from someone asking for advice. This doesn’t just apply to small businesses of course – it can apply to all kinds of people and companies, from large ones to small.

The point is that every connection we make starts with a phone call or an email. It starts with someone asking for our help and advice on something. There had to be a point when they decided ‘you know this isn’t something I can do alone. I need help with this.’ No matter how much or little knowledge they may have about the topic, they are unable to proceed any further on their own.

As a result they end up with a brand new website, a dynamic new logo or whatever else it was they wanted originally. As you can see, asking for help can have some wonderful consequences. Why not try it and see how it works for you?

Are You Stuck in a Rut?

No matter how good your business was to begin with, there is every chance you’ll get stuck in a rut eventually. Some ruts are borne out of success, where you end up achieving what you set out to with your business and not touching it because it works. This leads you to settle, and that can mean getting into a rut so deep you don’t even realise you’re in it until things stop working for you.

This isn’t meant to sound doom and gloom. But it has to be said that even the most successful businesses have gone under or been in danger of doing so because they haven’t changed to adapt to the conditions around them.

You only need to think of businesses like Woolworths to know this is true. This was a hugely successful institution for decades, only to fail a few years back. You can bet the rise of the internet and the success of other stores led to its downfall. The sad thing is that Woolworths never changed its business model. It was assumed that because it had succeeded for many years it would continue to do so for many more years too. Of course we all know this wasn’t the case. It failed mainly because it kept on ploughing the same rut, even though it wasn’t working.

It’s always a good idea to make sure you pay attention to your surroundings and not just your business. Sometimes a brand new website, a whole new rebrand or even a new direction can mean the difference between success and failure. As we’ve seen, the length of time you spend in business does not matter. What matters is how you use that experience and knowledge to keep going to bigger and better successes in the future.

If you think your business is in a rut, it’s time to do something about it. Take a step back and see where you started compared to where you are now. Think about whether you can achieve more with a brand new direction, a new website or a new approach. The chances are you can.

How Long Should it Take You to Write Content for Your Website?

This is a question many people ponder over when it comes to writing content for their sites. It doesn’t matter whether it is a blog post, an article, a web page or anything in between. Should it take fifteen minutes, an hour, two days or anything else?

In truth there is no firm answer to this question. In fact the question itself should be looked at from an entirely different angle. How long should it take to write worthwhile, engaging and strong content for your website that is designed to attract the very audience you are targeting?

Now there is a good question. And it is a question that really gets to the bottom of the whole idea of writing good content. You might find you can write a 400 word blog post in about five minutes, if you’ve thought of the idea for a while and it is already planned out in your mind. Sometimes they just flow and when this happens your content can be written in next to no time and it will still be worthwhile and engaging for your audience.

On other occasions it might take much longer to write a piece of the same length. You might have some research to do to beef it up, or it might simply take some time to find the right words to get across whatever it is you want to say.

Of course the other option is to get someone else – an expert writer – to create the content for you. They may be able to get things done faster than you would, simply because they have a routine they stick to every single day. In this case you could get the content you want faster than you would be able to if you were to write it on your own. You can still tweak it when you receive it if you wish, just to get your own voice in there to a greater degree.

But in any case you can see that it is impossible to set a certain length of time for creating good strong content.

Creativity and Its Role in Your Business

How important would you say creativity is when it comes to developing your business? Would you say it is the most important aspect of all, the tool that enables you to stand out among the crowd of competitors who are jostling you at every opportunity? Or would you say it doesn’t really have much bearing on what you do from day to day?

In truth, creativity is very important. Without it your business will eventually become stagnant. Just imagine what many websites would look like if they were still using the same design they started out with. In the case of some of the oldest online properties, they’d look very antiquated indeed.

Hence there is a real need to move ahead and be creative with every single day that passes. Think about creativity in all its forms and consider whether you are applying it to your own business. How long have you had that same old business card? Does your business look as if it is stuck in the past? Is your website due for an overhaul to make it look better, more modern and more dynamic?

Creativity doesn’t just keep your business looking and feeling fresh. It can spark a whole new direction to go in. Many of the businesses that go under and disappear completely are those that fail to move with the times. This can be avoidable in many cases, which is another reason why you should embrace creativity as much as you can.

Of course you don’t need to do all this on your own. Sometimes you might feel you need assistance from experts in the field to get the job done. You don’t need to be able to create a new website from scratch. Providing you have an idea of where you want to go with it, you can hire someone else to do it on your behalf. Sometimes it is a combination of ideas from you and skills from someone else that get the best results, so don’t be afraid to seek out help and advice from elsewhere.

Are You Getting Stuck into Social Media – Or Just Getting Stuck?

Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook – three of the most popular and often used social media sites for business people and entrepreneurs across the web. Are you one of them?

With so many corporate entities and businesses making the most of these social media sites today, it would be a crime not to join them. Social media can be intimidating when you first think about using it, which is why it makes sense to do some recon work first. Don’t jump in with both feet until you know where you are going to land. Making an untidy entry into social media is not a good idea. It can lead you to make mistakes – all of which will represent your business. So plan ahead and use the planning as a springboard into your social media activities.

One of the easiest ways to get used to how social media sites work and how other businesses use them is to stand by the sidelines and watch for a while. Pick a couple of business people or businesses you admire and follow them on Twitter. Give them the thumbs up on Facebook too and find out more about how they operate. How do they interact with their followers in each case? Each social media site works in a different way so you need to be sure you understand how to use each one to its best effect.

Of course the whole social media scene is very much a learning curve in itself. But if you plan in advance, do your homework and know how to use each site to its best advantage, you will at least avoid making some of the simplest mistakes that plenty of other people have made before you.

The truth is that social media is a powerful way to get in touch with the very people who could become your customers in the near future. Breaking down those barriers to get to know them is half of the battle – and it is a battle that can be won on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

What Should You Do If You Can’t Get Visitors?

Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much preparation you put into creating a website or blog and getting traffic to it. Whatever you do there are times when you simply can’t seem to get the visitors you want.

Some people simply give up when they get to this stage. But this is the point where you need to remember that not everything is easy to achieve. Very few websites get loads of traffic right from the start. Very often it is a gradual curve – a learning curve if you will – that moves up gradually and gains speed as it goes along. If you have unwittingly fallen into the ‘build it and they will come’ group of people, don’t worry. There are ways to generate fresh traffic to any website, regardless of how bad things look at the moment.

The best place to start is to consider whether your website is to blame. All websites have to be search engine friendly as well as friendly to the visitors you want to attract. If you have made it difficult for the search engines to find and index all your pages, there is less chance of turning up in their results.

Of course a lot of this is down to the content you have to add to your site as well. Are you adding content regularly enough? It should go without saying that a site with ten pages has far less chance of being found than a site with two hundred pages. The more pages you have, the more chance there is of being ranked for each one. You can build your site over time instead of adding everything in one hit of course, but it’s a target worth shooting for.

Sometimes trying to fix a struggling website can be too difficult to manage. It can be hard to know where to begin, let alone what to do about it. This is why many people opt to get professional assistance to boost their site up to where they want it to be. This might be something worth thinking about.

Are You Proud of Your Logo?

If you’re not, it’s time to get a new one. Even the best logos need freshening up every now and then, so if you’ve had yours for a long time (or worse, you don’t have one at all) think about getting a new one you can be proud of.

Logos are tricky to pin down when it comes to choosing one that represents the best of your business. That’s why many people hire the services of an experienced graphic design team like Ratio7 to get the job done for them. Experience in this area is vital in order to understand how effective a logo can be in defining everything a business stands for.

So you can see how important it is to be proud of your logo. Take a good look at the logo you have now and see what it makes you think of. Some people will immediately think of when they started their business, because they’re still using the same logo they had then. Certainly, if your business logo is outdated and tired looking, it will convey the exact same message about your business. This isn’t a good thing, and it is why so many logos eventually reach the end of their lifetime.

A logo should make you feel positive and enthused about your business. If you feel this way there is a good chance your customers will feel the same way too. Another point to note is not to be too complex with your logo. Again, a professional logo designer will come up with something that is relevant, eye catching and gets the right message across in the right way.

There is no defined period of time that a logo can or should last for. In reality there is no reason why you can’t use the same logo for many decades. But of course it is very unlikely that one logo could ever last that long, owing to how quickly the world changes.

Just be sure that when your logo finally looks dated and tired, you change it as quickly as you can. It could be the start of something new for your business.

We Don’t All Surf the Net on Computers Anymore

Recent years have seen an explosion in the number of smart phones in use in the UK and beyond. More of us are also using devices like iPads to get online without having to resort to switching on our computers to do so.

This means that your website has to be able to cope with being seen in different ways on different devices. There is a very real chance that a significant percentage of your website visitors are finding your site via a mobile phone or some other device – namely something that doesn’t have a large screen. If this is the case, you will lose out on that traffic if your website is not able to be easily viewed on such devices.

So when you get a new website for your business, one of the most important things to remember is to ensure everyone can see it properly. If you get 1,000 visitors a day and 40% of those find your site via a smart phone surfing session, that’s a potential 400 people you could lose as future customers. Of course you could have a mobile version of your website as well. If you do and you are ready to cater for this ever increasing audience as well as those who find you in the more traditional way, you won’t have to worry. You will also be streets ahead of your competition if they happen to be dragging their heels in providing a mobile version of their site for people to find.

It is certainly not wise to delay the task of finding customers in this way on these devices. When you realise it could make a difference to your bottom line, you’ll see that exploring all the different ways people surf the net and how you can reach more of them is incredibly important.

Fortunately it isn’t something you have to worry about if you hire a professional web design team like Ratio7 to do the work for you. As you can see, it could be an investment that lets you reach even more people.

What Message Does a Forgotten Blog Send to Your Customers?

There must be millions of blogs online that were started with enthusiasm, desire and excitement. But equally there are many that have since been forgotten. They are easy to spot – they would have had almost daily posts to begin with, perhaps for the first week or two at least, and then they dropped off virtually to nothing.

This is always a disappointment but in truth it can be more than disappointing when it is a business blog. In this case it can be harmful to business, because it does not present a good image to the people who come across that business to see if it might meet their needs.

Let’s say your own business blog has been neglected for a while. You might have very good reasons for this; you may have been busy serving your clients. But let’s say some prospective customers find your business via your blog and they take a look round to get an idea of what you do. Very soon they discover a wealth of blog posts… but none of them are recent. In fact it looks as though you haven’t blogged at all for a couple of months. What’s happening there?

The truth is that at this stage, you are in grave danger of losing those potential customers to another site. They could assume (and you couldn’t blame them for doing so) that you were no longer trading or that business wasn’t as good. If you can be seen to abandon your business blog so quickly, what might happen to the rest of your business?

As you can see, a forgotten blog can do a lot of harm to your business. The truth is you don’t need to put a lot of time into your blog if you want it to work for you. You can just do one post every week, which shouldn’t take long to create anyway. If you can do this you will give a strong and reliable impression to your customers and future customers – and that is worth a fortune.

Old and Tired Web Designs Hinder Your Business Progress

If you have stuck with the same website design through thick and thin, the chances are pretty good that you might be getting tired with it. And if you are getting tired of it you can be sure your web visitors will be as well.

The trick is to know when it is time to change and renew things for the better. Things change and advance quickly online and this means you could end up with an old web design sooner than you might think. If you have had the same design for a while now, it might be worth consulting a professional designer to see if you could revamp your website. You may well find you can revamp your whole business as well.

Of course you may not be sure if you have reached the point where your old design is old enough to get rid of. But if you consult with a professional designer you can get some input as to whether you are able to produce something new, modern and dynamic to better represent your business in the future.

The truth is that old and tired designs will harm your business more than anything else. If someone comes across your website and it looks very basic and old, they might be forgiven for wondering whether anyone is still running it, or whether it has been forgotten about and consigned to the scrapheap. This is not the kind of opinion you want people to form, so if you are ready to make the most of your website it might be time to give it a makeover.

Now some people immediately think of the cost of doing this and how it might affect them. But normally you will bring in more business as a result of having a fresh new website and design – especially if you promote the changes ahead of time and when they take place. So remember what you are getting here and how much it might be worth to you in the future. This is the most convincing reason there is to get a new web design.

Do You Really Need a Huge Website?

If you’re thinking about setting up a new website – regardless of what the reason might be for doing so – you might be thinking about size. Many websites are laden down with pages, sections, blogs and much more besides. But does this mean all websites should be built in this way?

Not at all; in fact it is far more likely that some sites would function just as well (perhaps even better) if they had just a few pages of information to offer. Too many pages can sometimes bloat out a site unnecessarily, making it large and cumbersome for no good reason.

This is why it is usually best to start with an idea of what you want to achieve with your site. If you have a clear plan you will be able to decide whether you need such a big site after all. For example if you run a cake decorating business that offers countless different designs for all kinds of occasions, it makes sense that you would need a large site. But if you have just one product to sell, you might be guilty of overload if you create a huge site around it. In a sense it actually confuses the customer because there is too much information for them to digest when they visit your site. If they cannot find what they want within a few moments of arriving on your site, they might leave without worrying about searching any longer. You couldn’t blame them.

So don’t make any assumptions when it comes to how many pages your new website needs. Work on some examples. Look for reasons to have a specific number of pages. Will your site need to grow in future or will it be just fine with a smaller number of pages – perhaps only two or three?

The more you learn about what your new site could look like, the easier it will be to work out what size site you will need. You can then press ahead with confidence so you stand a far better chance of getting the right site for the right purpose.

If you would like some advice or help on choosing the right size website, please get in touch. Our dedicated web design and development team would be happy to help.

Ensuring Your Website Visitors Meet Your Desires

Some people think all they need to do is to whack up a website and wait for the customers to come rolling in. Of course in reality things are very different. You might get some if you apply a casual approach to creating a website, but you won’t get as many as you would from a more targeted approach.

The best websites are dynamic, subtle and formulaic (in the nicest possible way). They have a purpose. It could be to get people to sign up for a free newsletter, so they can be marketed to at a later date. It could be to sell a particular product or line of products. But if the website doesn’t have a specific goal in mind it is more than likely that the results the webmaster gets won’t be what they would like.

This is why professional web design is so important. Few webmasters who design their own sites will start by asking themselves these questions: “What do I want to achieve with this site? What is my goal?” Professional web designers must have the answers to these questions if they are going to create a site that will achieve its purpose – one that will have a purpose in the first place.

For instance you may not want to sell anything directly through your website. You may simply want to provide information on a specific niche topic and to get people to sign up for a free newsletter to receive more information on a regular basis. Many marketers and webmasters will testify that the money really can be in the list if the list is big enough to generate the income they need.

The point is that any old website just won’t do. This is the face of your business and if you don’t know how it should look, you can’t expect to get the results you really want. Many people rush into getting their websites up and running. But in truth if you spend a little longer making sure you know your focus you’ll reap better rewards in the end.

Don’t Be Scared of Video

It’s amazing how many webmasters shy away from making videos for their websites. The normal way for many of them to get in touch with their readers is to write a blog post or an article. This is great for SEO and it provides content that the spiders can crawl to index for the search engines.

But it doesn’t tell the whole story and it doesn’t appeal to everyone. We don’t all have the time or the inclination to sit and read an entire blog post. And sometimes it’s nice to see just who is writing this particular blog or website.

This is where the power of the video comes in. Video creates a connection between the reader and the presenter that simply isn’t there in the average blog post or article. The best approach used by some people is to record a video and then provide a shorter post underneath it that goes over the content given in the video. This works well because people then have a choice of which type of content to look at or read. Some will do both.

But people do have a fear of making videos. They worry over their appearance or whether people will enjoy them or not. But here’s the thing – it is incredibly important not to worry about appearance. Obviously you want to look reasonably neat and tidy, but you’ll do that anyway. The important thing is to actually get on your computer and to make your video. People aren’t going to tune in to see what you look like. They’re going to tune in to see what you have to say. The content of your video is far more important than what you look like. Even in the world of video presentations, content is still king.

So if you haven’t yet added any videos to your website, think about making the change and doing it now. It could be one of the best things you ever do, and it might just open your site up to a whole new audience. You’ve nothing to lose by trying.

The Advantages of Adding Timely Content to Your Website

You probably already know how important it is to add content to your website on a regular basis. This is one of the most important ways to make sure your website ranks higher in the search engines. A regularly updated site is a fresh site with fresh content to share with its readers. It is very likely therefore to rank higher than a site that isn’t updated at all.

But there are different types of content that can be added to a site. Most people opt for evergreen content – content that will always be relevant no matter when people read it. For example if you have a website about SEO, you’ll probably include some of the basics about good SEO practice that will always be relevant, even in several years time.

However while evergreen content has its place, don’t overlook timely content. This is newsworthy content that is relevant to now. This traditionally does well initially but then drops away as it is no longer news. You can probably see why you should add this to your plans to consistently update your website, because it can bring in good short term traffic for you as well.

The point is that if someone visits your site because they have found a link to a newsworthy topic, they might read it and then stay to see what else they can find. So you can use timely content to find new readers and to keep them coming back for more in the future.

The trick is to get the balance right between newsworthy, timely content and the evergreen content that people love so much. In a sense you’re giving people two different ways to find your website. But both types of people are likely to stay and read more once they are there, so you are improving your chances of finding more traffic.

If you don’t already provide timely content on your website, now is the time to do so. Make sure you appeal to as wide a readership as possible and see what happens.

Avoiding the Bells and Whistles

Website design is a powerful tool. When it is used correctly it can engage the visitor and keep them on the site and the page. But it can also be too powerful for some to wield. This is why it makes sense to hire a professional in web design when it comes to creating or overhauling your website.

Let’s think about what you want your customers to experience when they land on your site. You want them to be engaged and drawn in. But you don’t want the bells and whistles that some people feel they have to include. Think of an overuse of Flash or too much content packed into the page. These are the bells and whistles of the title. Sometimes you can have so much to choose from that you don’t want to miss out on any of it. This is understandable but you can end up scaring away the very people you drew to your site in the first place.

If you have ever heard the saying ‘less is more’ you will know where we are coming from. Good web design is all about knowing what matters and knowing what doesn’t. This might change to a certain degree from site to site, depending on the audience you are targeting. But in many cases simplicity beats complexity more often than you might think.

How many times have you visited a website only to find that you feel bombarded by information the moment you arrive? The webmaster is clearly eager for you to know everything there is to know right from the start. But their eagerness can put you off staying for any length of time at all.

Don’t underestimate the chances of this happening with your site. Make sure you enlist the help of professionals like Ratio7 to prevent that overload situation from occurring. The bells and whistles might be tempting to you, but they will put off anyone who makes it to your home page. You want visitors – either for clicking your ads or buying your products or services. Don’t send them away through eagerness.

Do You ‘Get’ SEO?

Most people online today know what SEO means. But the importance of search engine optimisation can be underestimated. While it is true that some sites have succeeded despite having no sense of SEO in their content, many others have failed for the same reason. This is why it pays to make sure you do ‘get’ SEO.

Search engine optimisation is a vital part of any website. If you put good SEO practices into play, it’s like holding up a brightly coloured flag and waving it at the search engines saying ‘Hey! I’m over here!’ By attracting their attention you can look forward to being seen and being listed – perhaps more highly – in their search results.

The truth is that a basic knowledge of SEO will be sufficient for most people to start getting results with their website. It starts with ensuring your site is built in the right way. While you can build your own website these days, there are successful web designers around for a reason. They can often make light work of a task that might take you weeks to complete, if not months – especially where SEO comes into it. A solidly built website will always appeal more readily to the search engines, and since you want to be found it makes sense that you would want to start right.

Some people understand the basics of SEO more easily than others. In truth it is reasonably easy to pick up the basics. It pays to think about it in two different ways. Your SEO efforts must appeal to the search engines so you can be listed appropriately, and you should also appeal to your actual visitors, so they can find you for the best and most appropriate terms. This should make life easier for you, so bear this in mind when it comes to learning the ropes.

The good news is that if SEO completely escapes you, you can always enlist the services of Ratio7 to help you out. If you aren’t getting the results you would like to get from your SEO efforts, perhaps it is time to consider such a service.

Will You Continue With the Same Old Plans This Year?

There is a saying that goes something like this: “If you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’ll carry on getting what you’ve always got.”

How true that is. But lots of people will stride out into the early days of 2012 and follow that adage without even realising it. It might be that your business didn’t achieve what you wanted it to during 2011. No worries – that year has passed and what’s done is done. But now you have a new opportunity to do something different to change the results you got before. Will you do it?

Sitting down and making plans to change things is one thing. But you have to put those plans into action to achieve the alternative results you want. Set dates for these goals so you are accountable to them. Don’t just decide you want a new overhaul of your website so you can earn more from it in the coming year. Decide when you want to do it and start looking for a company that can help you achieve this new goal.

Lots of us start the New Year with resolutions of one kind or another. But you don’t have to carry on down the usual path of forgetting all about them and falling back into your old habits by February 1st. Seize the opportunity to do something new and worthwhile with your business. Do something you’ve never done before – you might be surprised at the results you get.

Breaking out of your usual pattern can be difficult. But planning for changes is the best way to achieve it. If you’re not convinced, look back on the plans you had in the past. Do you still feel they were the best you were capable of? Perhaps they were at that time, but you’re a different person now. Your business might have progressed too. New plans for the future are a good gift to give to you for 2012, so don’t waste the opportunity to make the most of them starting from today onwards.

How Regular are Your Blogging Efforts?

Blogs can be extremely powerful traffic generators and money spinners. But they can also fail miserably. Which category would you put your blog into?

Even if you have reluctantly admitted that your blog fits better in the second category than the first, it’s not too late to do something about it. There is an affliction in blogging that we might call shiny new blog syndrome. When your blog is new you want to blog on it all the time. It’s exciting, thrilling and has the potential to be a money spinner.

But eventually you get bored with it, probably because it isn’t making the kind of progress you wanted it to. The problem is that most people give up way too soon. It’s only by blogging regularly that you can hope to produce a blog that will enhance your business or simply make money for you in itself.

Think about this for a moment. Let’s say there are two similar businesses in the same line of work and they each have a blog. One has ten blog posts on it, whereas the other one has a hundred. This means the second blog has ten times as many ways to attract visitors as the first blog. The more posts are added the more chance there is to get the stream of visitors wanted in the first place.

Do you see how this works? Regularity is half the battle when it comes to blogging. If you are consistent and you continually add new posts, the search engines will see your blog is current and rank it higher accordingly. In addition to this you’ll have more ways to attract an audience – and that audience could end up going into your sales funnel to produce more sales in the future.

The trick is to get past the shiny new blog syndrome and reach a stage where regular blogging is a habit. Once you’re there you can look forward to the real rewards from blogging – rewards that will continue to pay dividends long into the future. Isn’t it worth persevering with regular posts?

Do You Have a Plan for Your Business for 2012?

It hardly seems possible that another year is nearly over. But here we are, looking back on 2011 and looking ahead to the promise of 2012. There is no doubt that 2011 has been a tough trading year for many people. But whether you include yourself in that description or not, there couldn’t be a better time to look ahead and decide what you want to achieve with your business in 2012.

Here’s an example for you to consider. Lots of people make the mistake of getting their businesses online and then doing nothing more to develop or enhance them. But if you stand still you end up going backwards, because other businesses will be working hard to try and pass you. If you’ve been guilty of this during 2011 don’t worry – you could change things and be pro-active during 2012. You just have to take that first step in the right direction.

If you don’t yet have a website to promote your business, you can make that your goal for 2012. If you do have a website, make now the time to take a closer look at it to see whether you can improve on it for the New Year. Lots of people think that developing their business means pouring lots of money into it. But this simply isn’t the case. Don’t equate money with development – equate pro-active thinking with development instead. That’s the beauty of working online – you can easily think about different things to do to make your business better for the New Year.

The worst thing to do would be to sit back and carry on doing as you’ve been doing in the past. Many of us will have New Year’s Resolutions for January 1st and beyond. We might want to lose weight or kick a bad habit. But many more would like to have an online business they can earn money from and be proud of. If you have one already, make sure you construct a solid development plan for the New Year. Whatever the financial climate might be, you’ll feel better and earn more if you do.

What to Do When an Online Revenue Stream Dries Up

If you read this part of our website on a regular basis, you’ll know that we have written about the advantages of multiple revenue streams before. But just as other revenue streams can dry up, so can internet revenue streams. The trick is in knowing what to do when this happens.

Multiple revenue streams are always the best way to earn money. Even in a good economic climate if you only rely on one revenue stream and it disappears, you’ll be in dire straits very quickly indeed. Fortunately the internet enables you to earn lots of revenue streams if you put the time and effort into setting them up in the first place.

But when one of those streams dries up, it can still be disappointing. The question you have now is what you will replace it with. The first step is to find out how much cash you will lose each month from not having that revenue stream in place. This is the amount you will need to replace to get the same level of income back again. Of course if you can replace it with more cash, so much the better.

Think about whether you want to replace the lost income in the same way. For example you may have lost an advertising contract on your blog or website. Do you want to replace it with another advertising agreement or do you want to do something else instead? You might want to add reviews of certain products in the hope of earning affiliate income from them for example.

The most important thing is to brainstorm as many ideas as possible as you try to find an alternative stream of income. The great thing about this is that you can usually find more than one idea to put into action.

Have you ever heard the saying that when a door is closed a window is opened somewhere else? Think of this as shutting a door and opening two windows. Or possibly three – you just never know. But the best thing is that where one income stream has disappeared, there are always others lurking around waiting to take its place.

Making Sure Your Business Blog Has a Purpose

A business blog without a purpose is like the proverbial ship without a rudder. It heads off to find new lands and experiences, but it doesn’t stand much chance of actually getting there. If it does find something worthwhile it will be due to chance more than anything else.

So how can you make sure your business blog has a focus, a purpose, a place to be?

The key is to think about what you want to achieve from your blog. Remember this is very different from a personal blog where it doesn’t really matter what you blog about. When you blog for your business you need to be professional and focused otherwise you could do more harm than good.

For example one of the key reasons many business people start a blog is to find new clients. This is a good goal to have, and it also helps you understand what you should be blogging about. This is why you need a goal in the first place. If you know this is your aim, you know you have to write blogs that appeal to your client’s needs. Let’s say your business provides shop fittings for stores of all shapes and sizes. You could write a blog explaining how important it is to have new shop fittings instead of making do with old ones. Thus you are imparting a convincing message that tells shop owners to ensure their shops are looking good, as well as hopefully drumming up some business for you.

As you can see, having a purpose for your blog will also make it easier to write new posts for it. It’s always harder to write blogs when you have no real purpose or idea about what your blog is there for in the first place.

If you have already started a business blog and it doesn’t have much direction, don’t worry. This is the best time to stop, sit back and take a fresh look at it. You can always start from the beginning again, and you might be surprised at the results you get from doing so.

Finding Inspiration for Your Business

Most businesses are inspiring to us when we first get them up and running. But during difficult times it can be hard to find the same inspiration that got us started.

It’s natural to feel like this from time to time, but it doesn’t mean you should be worried about the future. In fact it can be the best time to take a fresh look at your business and how it works, so you can see whether you are still heading in the right direction. You don’t have to be resigned to walking down the same road all the time. You can try a new path, a new direction that will inspire you to achieve more in the future.

Some businesses veer away from their original brief. There is nothing wrong with this – it can lead to even bigger success. But you should know how and why this has occurred if you see it happening to your own business. Remember you are always in control, even if you don’t always see it.

In other situations you might find you still have the same brief you had to start with, but it doesn’t inspire you in the same way it used to. In this case you should make time to sit down and analyse every aspect of your business to see what is missing. Sometimes it is simply the case of needing a change. You might have had the same website design since your business began for instance. Maybe it is time for a brand new design to refresh things and show your clients you are looking ahead to the future?

The main thing to remember is that inspiration can be found in all kinds of places. It doesn’t mean you have to change everything, ditch your original business idea or even resign yourself to staying as you are. Inspiration can revolutionise all kinds of businesses and revive the passion that was there to begin with. Don’t let that stagnant feeling last: it doesn’t have to. Who knows what you could start to achieve when 2012 arrives?

Smart Videos Connect With New Customers

The internet age has given every business far more ways in which to communicate with their potential customer base. But sometimes you need a little help in making that connection, especially if you’re using a brand new method you’re not familiar with to get the message across.

Take video production for example. Most of us aren’t familiar with the skills and techniques required to make a good eye catching video that gets views for all the best reasons and not just for the shoddy camerawork. We’re not all Steven Spielberg after all. So it makes sense to jump onto this particular bandwagon in order that you can try out a cohesive and thoughtful video marketing campaign for your business.

Luckily businesses like Ratio7 have plenty of experience in dealing with this particular medium. It is one thing to have a great idea for a video, but if you don’t have the required skills to make it look and feel professional you will end up doing damage to your business instead of improving it.

In many cases business owners love the idea of having a video to help promote their business, or even a particular product they sell, but they don’t know where to begin. With no experience in the field it can be tricky to come up with a smart and fresh idea that really works. Sinking money into video production might not seem like a smart idea when there are so many other things you could be investing in. But remember that you’ll get a video that will be online and available to view for months and possibly years to come. As more and more people view it you have the potential to enjoy an ever increasing stream of traffic. Indeed, if you manage to make your video go viral, you could end up with more business than you ever thought possible.

So think seriously about the idea of video production and making your business more visible in a different way. It might just make the difference you have been looking for up until now.

Is Your Website Embracing the Future?

There was a time – a good few years ago now – when all you had to do to get online was to whack up a very simple website with a very basic design.

Nowadays of course all this has changed. It’s not enough to have a website anymore – you have to have a site that looks good, feels good and works just as your customer wants it to. If it doesn’t, you’ll lose customers. It’s that simple. This is why many businesses are enlisting the services of experts in web design – like the team at Ratio7 – to create a strong and dynamic website design to impress their customers and visitors.

But there is more to consider here as well. For instance more and more people are looking at websites on their smartphones and iPads and other similar devices. How user friendly is your site when it is called up on one of these devices? If you don’t have a mobile version of your site, now would be an excellent time to get one. This makes it much easier for anyone on a mobile phone to view your site. If you have ever tried viewing a normal website on such a small screen you will know how frustrating it can be. Even if you decide to check the website later when you have access to a proper computer, you might forget to do so, or decide to go elsewhere instead.

You can see then how important it is to have a website that is capable of embracing the future in this way. It’s not enough to have a good website anymore. You have to have one that is able to be viewed properly no matter how your customers decide to access it. That’s why it pays to get the experts in, so you know exactly what you will be offering your customers.

You might consider teaching yourself how to do all this. But where does that leave the rest of your business? Your target should be to create the best website for all platforms as quickly as possible – and to hire the pros to do it for you.

What is the Difference Between a Website and an Optimised Website?

If you’re not sure, the chances are you’ve got the first kind. The answer to this question is simple – optimised sites tend to get a lot more relevant traffic than ones that haven’t been optimised. Search engine optimisation – or SEO to give it its shorter and more manageable name – is very important when it comes to creating and maintaining websites. Ideally proper optimisation should be done when a website is created. But if you already have a site up and running and it’s not getting the results or the traffic you want, it is possible that a lack of SEO is the culprit.

The problem is that many business people who have websites are just that – business people. They don’t understand the ins and outs of SEO, and it can take a while to learn just the basics, let alone the more advanced stuff. That’s why it can prove to be a great investment to hire someone else to do the heavy lifting in the SEO department. Not only does it leave you free to get on with running your business, it also means you know your website is being fully optimised to gain the best results.

When it’s done right, optimisation can bring you visitors who are looking for a site just like yours. Furthermore it can also bring you visitors who are late in the process of deciding to make a purchase. For example let’s say you get two visitors to your website that sells coffee machines. One is looking for general information on coffee machines, while the other is looking for information on a specific brand and model of coffee machine. The likelihood is that the second person is far more likely to buy, because they have already decided on the machine they want.

This is how in depth SEO can result in better traffic instead of just more traffic. The experts can overhaul your site so you get the quality traffic you want and make more sales as a result. Isn’t it time you let the pros get on with the SEO?

Are You Scared of Developing Your Online Business?

Doing business online is the best way to find new customers in all kinds of locations. But if you are used to having an offline presence you might feel nervous about going online and having your own website. This is particularly true if you are thinking of actually selling your goods and services from the site itself.

Depending on your way of thinking, it might be the fear of failure that’s making you nervous. What if you spend money getting your website set up and you don’t get any customers or make any orders? Will it all have been a waste of time and energy? Furthermore some people go in the opposite direction – they actually fear being successful! This might sound strange but when you think about it, it does make sense. Supposing you are inundated with orders? Will you struggle to fulfil them all? Will you have to take on extra staff?

The important thing to remember is that such feelings are perfectly normal. If you do it right, getting your business online can take it to the next level of success. This means changing the way you do things now. You might have to cater for more orders, whether you provide goods or services. This means preparing for how things might change when you have a website – but it doesn’t mean not doing it at all.

The truth is that businesses without websites are far more likely to get left behind. Indeed some businesses now operate solely online because they know that more and more people are shopping in this way. It’s always a little nerve wracking leaving what you’re used to and trying something new. But once your brand new professionally designed website is up and running and you see the effect it has on your business, you’ll see just how good things could get.

If you’re still not convinced and your nerves about going online are getting the better of you, remember that every new thing that has become a part of your life produced those same nerves first. Don’t let them stop you now.

The Advantages of Multiple Online Revenue Streams

The internet is changing all the time, and as it changes the idea of making money online can change too. There used to be a time when anyone could set up a simple website and expect to make some money from it, but those times are long gone. The good news is that there are many more ways to make money online now than there were previously, so it makes sense to make the most of as many methods as possible.

However there are ways and means to do it. For starters it is best to focus on just one income stream. For instance you might have a passion for a particular subject and so you set up a blog about it that you can monetise with Google Adsense and perhaps Amazon ads too. But it would be unwise to do anything beyond this to begin with. Instead you should focus your energies on building up this first income stream before you set up any others. This will enable you to make the most of the first one. Once it has started earning money for you, you can move on to another income stream and focus solely on that in much the same way.

But why earn different streams of income online in the first place? Well there are many reasons for doing it, not least the fact that it protects your overall income. Every single website you have represents a stream of income for you. However you can never be sure that any individual site will continue to earn money for the long term. So by setting up different ones on different topics and ensuring they all have different aims, you can increase your total income while protecting it at the same time.

You can probably see how smart this is. If you have a regular job and you lose it, you will go from full time income to no income in a matter of minutes. But even if one website in your arsenal falls flat, it has little effect on the total income you are earning.

Doesn’t that sound like a great idea?

Do You Understand Your Business?

Yes it’s a strange question, but it’s one that should be answered – especially if you’re going to make it profitable.

It’s amazing that some people aren’t able to describe their business in a single sentence. For some reason some believe that setting up an online business and promoting a website is a lot easier than creating an offline business. But this isn’t true. You can certainly do it with a lot less cash behind you, but sooner or later you have to realise that without a solid business plan you’re going to fail.

When you look at your business (or your website if you already have one) you should be able to say something like this:

• “I sell eBooks on internet marketing to people who want to start a new online business.”
• “I make money from Google Adsense from my niche site on gardening.”
• “I sell a range of goods and services to golfers of all abilities.”

Every single one of these statements describes a business. If you can’t look at your own website or online business idea and make a similar statement, you need to go back to the drawing board.

Obviously it helps to have a website that works for you instead of against you. It’s no good just putting a whole bunch of ideas into a single site in the hope that one will work. You have to be focused and hold onto a single idea or plan each time. The same applies to your online business. That’s why the single question – “do you understand your business?” – is worth answering every time you have an idea for a website or online venture.

Ratio7 designs and creates websites for all kinds of people and businesses. But in each case one of the first questions we’ll ask is this: “What is your business all about?” If you don’t know, we can’t build a website that will work to bring in more revenue for you.

So as you can see, it’s a great question to start with. The more you understand your business, the more cash it will be capable of bringing in.

Does Your Website Say Wow?

More to the point, do you know how to make it say wow? Let’s face it most of us know a good website when we see one. It’s also fair to say we can easily spot a bad website. Bad websites make us flee to other, safer havens. Good ones make us stick around and explore what there is to offer, even if we only intended to take a quick look in the first place.

This is where we can see the difference between designing your own site and getting a pro to do it for you. Many people want to save money and do it themselves, but this method isn’t always backed up by the degree of knowledge that is required to get that wow factor in place.

The first step in making your website say wow is to figure out how you want to wow people. There are a million and one ways to do it and you need to know which one you are going to use. Trying to construct a website with more than one aim often leads to a messy and disorganised site that tries to do too much and achieves nothing.

All good websites have a focus. This focus helps them to achieve the much sought after wow factor. For instance it might be to sell products. It might be to educate people on a specific subject. It might be to promote a service. If you look at websites that clearly don’t say wow, you will probably see that their offerings are confusing and perhaps overwhelming too. Sometimes simple is better and it certainly helps you to understand where you can get the wow factor from.

If you’re totally in the dark about where to start and how to achieve the look you want for your website, start by looking elsewhere. Websites that are already successful can give you clues as to how it’s done. The worst thing you can do is to jump in without thinking it through first. Remember this – no website that has the wow factor ever got it through luck alone.

Do You Spend Money on Your Business – Or Do You Invest It?

People seem to have very different opinions on what money means when it comes to their business. Some people are reluctant to put money into their online venture because they think of it as a gamble. Why invest money in a website when you may not get a single penny in return?

It’s true that you can start making money from an online business without investing any money in it first. But most businesses find they reach a level where they do have to invest in order to grow further. This is the simple change of thinking that is required when it comes to succeeding online. Instead of spending money on your website, invest it. Spending money implies that you are not getting much in return. Investing it implies you are putting it into something with the hope of getting more money back in return. Just one word difference, and yet it has a vastly different meaning.

Of course it’s not good enough to pour money into your business and feel better about it just by thinking of it in a different way. If you are truly going to call what you’re doing an investment, the money needs to be spent in a way that will generate possibilities to earn more money in return. It is this way of thinking that brings you the opportunity to truly grow your online business, rather than letting it stagnate.

So whatever you do online, take some time to focus on how you approach the idea of money. Are you scared to spend money on your business because you think you will lose it? If you are you could be wasting a golden opportunity to earn more money than you ever thought you could. Yes, you can put a website together on a shoestring budget. But it won’t look as good as a professionally designed website that has the potential to earn you much more.

Don’t spend money on your internet business. Start investing it in your internet business instead. Because you expect a return, you’ll see far smarter ways to use your cash to get more in return.

The difference between good and great

Yesterday I took a much needed day off and headed into London to do some photography and to generally recharge my design batteries.

Now I’m a creature of habit so I started off my day as I always do by visiting one of my favorite coffee shops in Shaftsbury Avenue. I discovered this place a few years ago with a friend and is no normal coffee shop. They served the most amazing organic muffins (warmed to order, I must add), fantastic coffee served in a small trendy soup bowl and even little sachets of hand cleaners which is great if you’ve just come of the tube, topped off with a prompt and friendly service.

However sadly today’s experience was different. The service was terrible, the coffee was served in a standard mug, they were out of hand cleaners and the muffin was served cold. All the things that had made this place stand out from the other thousands of coffee shops had gone.

And how much had it cost this coffee shop to stand out from the others? 20p to heat the muffin? 10p for the hand cleaner and maybe 70p for a trendy soup bowl? No expensive marketing campaign, trendy branding or marketing materials… just £1 – the difference between good and great.

Have You Forgotten About Offline Marketing?

There is no doubt that the internet has become the focus of all our lives over the past decade or so in particular. This has led to many new and exciting ways to promote your business. You can have a website, you can have countless social media accounts and you can have a blog. There is plenty more you can do to promote your wares online too.

But where does offline marketing sit in the big mix now? Remember that? Offline marketing is a totally different concept to online marketing but it doesn’t mean it is no longer relevant. We might still go online and check emails, surf websites and engage with each other on Facebook, but we live offline lives as well.

This means you have to focus on both methods of marketing if you are going to get your business in front of as many people as possible. Even if you own a purely online business that doesn’t have a bricks and mortar shop front, you have to recognise that there are different ways of engaging with people.

The trouble is that it seems as if some businesses have forgotten all about offline marketing. This is why it pays to call in the experts. You can gain access to a far wider range of ideas on marketing simply by consulting someone who knows what they’re doing. There is no shame in not knowing anything about offline marketing – after all, the onus is all on social media marketing and emailing newsletters now, isn’t it?

So maybe it’s time we swung things back in the opposite direction. Not to ignore online marketing, but to redress the balance so we can make the most of both forms of marketing. They take very different approaches and very different skills, but they can both help to enhance and develop any kind of business, no matter what it is you sell.

It’s understandable that you’d want to make the most of this big new shiny thing called the internet. After all it is developing at a rate of knots. But there is something quite homely about traditional offline advertising too, isn’t there?

How Do You Know When Your Brand Needs a Revamp?

A brand is the image of a business. It’s amazing how we can take a shape, a colour or a clever idea and combine them to create something that people will instantly recognise.

The best brands are world famous. A successful brand is something that every company and business strives to achieve. But what do you do when you gain that achievement? How long can you hang on to a successful brand for before it needs a revamp?

It’s important here to distinguish between a brand and a logo. A logo could be said to be a part of a brand. Change the logo and you could change the brand in some way. The two are connected but different. You could make alterations to the brand and the logo may no longer be relevant.

Clearly sometimes it is time that catches up with your brand. A brand is all about making people believe your product or business will give them a positive experience. A successful brand sells more products.

Sometimes even a successful brand will come to the end of its lifetime. Sticking with the same brand for years on end gives the image that your business is a stick in the mud that never moves with the times. Take a look at the branding for businesses in the Fifties and see how much of it is the same today. You won’t find much – if anything – that is still around today.

On some occasions a company that wants to take a whole new direction might find its existing branding won’t adapt to go with it. But the views of the public can also make a big difference, since some changes in logos and branding have been met with derision from the public. Clearly you have to consider the views of your audience – it’s not just about what you want to do.

One thing is certain though; you have to get the advice of a professional company in order to consider any changes you want to make to your brand. This is one area where professional knowledge counts for an awful lot.

Why Don’t You Have an E-Newsletter?

More and more businesses are realising that e-newsletters are a wise way to build their business. Not only do they keep your business name in the forefront of your customers’ minds, they also generate more sales over the short and long term.

It’s understandable that you might feel nervous about committing to a regular newsletter. After all every single one has to be filled with content. But don’t get too nervous about this – you shouldn’t make them too long otherwise people won’t be motivated to read them.

Don’t feel you have to send out an e-newsletter every ten minutes either. Many companies stick to once a month and this frequency seems to work well. Weekly can be too much for many people, because it feels like you’re constantly trying to sell to them. Remember to add value and not just sales promotions and you’ll do better at getting the balance right.

Of course style and design count for a lot too. If you send out a hastily cobbled together newsletter it won’t catch the eye anywhere near as much as a professionally designed e-newsletter template will. It’s tempting to just get by and send out whatever you can. But generally speaking you can get far better results from your e-newsletter when you invest in it to begin with. Think about the benefits you’ll get from a professional design – a better business image, more respect and more trust from your customers and would be customers. Wouldn’t you want to take advantage of all that?

It’s understandable that some businesses will be wary of investing in their business at a time when the economy is so unsteady. But if you don’t get out there and tell people who you are, they won’t buy from you – simply because they don’t know you exist. You have to give them a reason to remember you and buy from you, and an e-newsletter is just the ticket for doing that.

Think about your business and what you could achieve with it. Isn’t it time you thought about adding an e-newsletter into the mix?

What Does Your Personal Blog Say About You?

A blog is, by definition, all about you. At least it is if it’s a personal blog. But that doesn’t mean you should put any less work or effort into it than you should with a blog designed to promote your company or business.

A lot of people want to earn money from their blog, and why not? If you could earn an income stream from writing about something you love, wouldn’t you want to do it?

The problem is that your personal blog represents you. This means that if you opt for a free design or template to build your blog around, you might not give the right impression to people who find you online. Designing your own blog is far from easy, and if you want to make money with it you need a design that will tell people you’re serious and you believe in quality.

Using a free blogging service tells people you’re not interested in investing in your blog for the benefit of yourself and others. Let’s face it, which blog are you going to like the most – the free one or the one that has clearly been designed to appeal to its visitors?

It’s always going to be the latter. So even if you want to make money from your blog in the future and not necessarily straightaway, it’s still worth thinking about getting a proper and unique design done on your behalf. Your blog should be as individual as you are, so it makes sense to get an individual and unique design doesn’t it?

Blogs are definitely taken more seriously now than they used to be in the past. They provide a window onto your life that other people are allowed to look through. If you’re going to allow people into your life in this way, make sure they get the best possible view. You never know what it might lead to in the future, so it makes sense to make a great start. Your blog is all about you, so make the right impression from the off.

Getting the Balance of Words and Images Just Right

Your website is a window onto the world – a window through which potential customers can look to find what they need. It almost seems as if everyone knows what a good website should look like, but actually designing one and getting the right mix of words and images is a lot harder than you think.

Images speak a thousand words, or so we’re told. But content is king too, and content is what people come to read. We all like images and they can catch your attention long before the words on a page do. But the two components of a website have to work together to have the desired effect on anyone who visits that site.

There is no dream equation or formula that unlocks a great web design. It’s not as simple as putting one image in place for every four hundred words you use. If only life could be that simple. This is why it’s best to get the experts in when it comes to designing a website that makes the most of each component. It’s the only way you can be sure of getting a website that is designed to do what you want it to do.

Furthermore the words and images need to be working together and not against each other. When you’ve got the skills of an experienced web designer working for you, you can be sure that the balance will be much easier to strike than if you were to tackle it on your own. You might have ideas for your website but actually getting them to work and making them real can be very difficult. Just how big should your logo be, for example? Do you have so many words for the home page that you’re tempted to squish them down to fit them all in?

Less can be more when it comes to web design. But you can only get the balance of words and images just right when you think of them as two halves of the whole. It’s the only way you’ll get the website you want.

Can’t You Just Write it Yourself?

If there is one thing that many webmasters try to get done on their own, it’s copywriting. It doesn’t matter whether that means coming up with blog posts, articles or content for their website, they want to do it all themselves. It seems to be the one thing they’ll cobble together in a hasty half hour while they pay the experts to do everything else for them.

But copywriting is as much a skill as web designing is. If you really want the best for your website, it does matter which words you put where. When altering one or two strategic words can make a difference to your conversion rate, it makes sense to get the experts in for this as well.

There are other convincing reasons why you should get a professional to write for you too. They know the industry inside out, and they know exactly what to write and how to write it to enable you to get more profits from your site. Putting your thoughts into words sounds easy, and it might be if you’re writing a diary no one else will see. But think about it – your website will be seen by hundreds of people, potentially many thousands if you hit on a great idea. Doesn’t it deserve to have the best possible content on it as well as the best possible design?

Unfortunately it comes down to the money with many people. Why invest in words when you can create them on your own? That’s their motto, but the best motto to have is to invest in the future of your business. That’s the best way to think about copywriting – as an investment. Stronger, better words that make more sense and convince your visitors to take certain actions.

It’s easy to fill a website with words and sentences. But how good are they when they’re done almost as an afterthought? Too many people are treating their businesses as an afterthought when they should be investing in the best possible services to transform them. What’s your approach and how is it working for you?

How can you tell if your logo is good enough?

Hop on the internet and it won’t take you long to find reams of information about logos. What makes a good one? When is it time to change an old logo and revamp it into something new and more modern? How do you know if you’ve got a real stinker?

Logos are one of the things we do here at Ratio7. We’ve got years of experience in knowing just how to create the best logo for any business. A logo is one of those strange and wonderful things that are hard to describe – you know a bad one when you see it, and you know a good one too. But putting each type of logo into words is incredibly difficult, which is why it’s always best to get the experts in to design a new one.

A good logo is something that instantly brands your business. A bad logo will brand it too, but not in a good way. The worst kind of logo is arguably one that you look at for five minutes, and you’re still not sure what on earth it is or what it represents.

If you’ve got a good logo it will get positive responses from your clients. It will also be recognisable, even if they see the logo outside of its usual placement. For example if a client happens upon your social media pages and sees the logo before reading any text, will they be able to recognise it as yours? Furthermore will it give them a positive image they like? Positivity is a major aspect to remember here, as the logo has a major job to do to represent your business.

Great logos look good whatever size they are as well. If your logo looks great in large format but practically disappears when it has to be shrunk to fit a magazine ad, it’s time to get a new one.

In short, if you’re not sure how well your current logo is performing for you, you can always contact us here at Ratio7 to find out more about getting a brand new logo designed with just you in mind.

Does anybody actually make money from blogging?

Now this is a complex question that has many answers. For starters you can make money in two ways from any blog – either directly or indirectly. Directly would mean putting links and adverts on your blog. When someone clicks on them you earn some cash. Indirectly means setting up a blog that is connected to your business. You might blog about trends in your business sector, or new products you are getting ready to launch.

Certainly it’s worth remembering that lots of businesses regularly make money as a result of having a blog. Some would go so far as to say you’d be leaving money on the table if you didn’t bother to create a blog for this reason.

The trouble is that when people talk about making money from blogging, they’re usually only thinking in the direct form. If they’ve got a blog and their ads aren’t making them enough money, they’re not doing well. But sometimes it’s the indirect cash you earn from your blog that means the most. How many people might come across your business blog and find it worth reading on a regular basis? How many might find out about a product of yours that you’ve blogged about by doing so? How many might then go on to become a customer, even though you wouldn’t directly know that such an occurrence had happened?

When we talk about people who make money from their blogs, we only ever focus on those who blog for a living. If you own a business, a blog is a sideline – it’s an essential marketing tool that can enhance the results you are getting. It’s not easy to see how much such a blog might make for the parent company, but suffice to say it could be a significant amount over the long term.

If you don’t yet have a business blog and you’re wondering whether it’s worth creating one, read through the above information again. Can you see just how powerful it can be when you start thinking of your blog as an indirect money making machine instead of a direct one?

The popularity of the blog

Research undertaken by Universal McCann in 2008 revealed that there were around 184 million active blogs available on the Internet. Since then, the popularity of blogging has accelerated rapidly – to the point where accurate figures have not as yet been obtained for 2009-2011, this would suggest that blogs are not a passing phase.

So why exactly do people love blogging so much? And how can a blog help a company to sell its products and/or services? Certainly, information is power – and the Internet allows us to exchange information on a higher level than ever before. We can now speak to our existing customers and target new prospects on a global level using online communications.

And that’s where the humble blog can be useful – sure, blogging can be a fun way to share our daily activities with the masses, but did you know that it’s also a very powerful marketing tool? Let’s say that you have a new product in stock. You add the product to your website, along with a description and any relevant pricing information. It’s a great start, but then you need to get the consumer interested enough to actually invest in the product.

Using a blog, you can promote your new product and provide a little more information for your customers to consider. You may have a limited word count on your website, but by using a blog you can really ‘go to town’ when describing key product features and benefits. Your blog can then be linked to your website and to any other online marketing platforms that you currently use.

Blogging can also be a great way to announce company news and events. If you have a promotion, sale or a new member of staff joining the company, you can get the word out there using a blog. People are naturally drawn to compelling and creative text, so the more interesting a blog is – the more likely people are to read it.

So – are blogs here to stay?  – the indications would suggest that the answer is most definitely yes. When done correctly, blogging can be a very positive and productive experience for virtually any company.

Standing out from the crowd

There’s very little doubt that the current financial climate is proving to be very difficult for many companies. Staying ahead of the competition and getting your products and services acknowledged by the masses can be a real challenge. Internet commerce provides consumers with more choice than ever before and in this fierce and competitive new world we must embrace new technologies and marketing methods to really achieve success.

So what is the solution? – how can you make your company stand head and shoulders above the rest? It’s not a quick and easy process, that’s for sure. Competition is rife in virtually every sector – just a few years ago, you may have been the market leader in your area, now you may be struggling just to keep up with the rest. Perhaps the key is to examine what other companies are actually doing right? Generally speaking, the businesses that are having continuous success in recent years can be sectioned into two key areas – those who already had a solid customer database in the pre-recession years and those who are offering a unique service.  Loyalty can take time but you can achieve great success using the latter.

Have a think about your company and the products/services that you currently offer. What makes you stand out from the crowd? Or to put it in a different way – what can you offer to your customers that no-one else can? It’s not always as simple as just supplying the newest product available on the market – you’re probably not the only company doing so. However, if you are the only company selling a product at a certain price or you can offer a speedier delivery service than your counterparts, you may be onto a winner.

Great customer service and communication methods are also vitally important in this harsh climate. With seemingly endless choice, consumers now look past the actual product, to the company itself. Those companies who excel at providing great customer service or use new technologies to communicate with their customers are always going to gain an advantage over those who don’t – so take a little time out to consider any areas that you can improve upon – you’ll be glad that you did!

Spelling mistakes are costing us millions!

Online entrepreneur Charles Duncombe has released information about the shocking state of spelling on websites. Following an in-depth analysis of website figures, it has been revealed that the use of bad spelling can actually cut online sales by half. This news is rather worrying – to put it mildly!

So what exactly is going on here? Are we forgetting the basics of the English language, and if so, why? While many people will blame the Internet for the shocking standards of English today, perhaps it’s not solely responsible. After all, the Internet has provided us with a quicker way to communicate, but there really is no excuse for using poor spelling and grammar – it’s just plain lazy.

Have you ever visited a website and seen occurrences of bad spelling? I have – and the mistake may as well be highlighted in yellow and shouting out your name, it’s so obvious to the eye. The worrying thing is – many of these mistakes can be found on websites that are promoting an actual writing or marketing service! I’m sure that you’ll agree that there’s nothing more off-putting to potential customers.

SEO companies realise that bad spelling is rife online– the problem is so widespread that many will use incorrect spellings on purpose when marketing websites – but is this just encouraging us to behave badly, rather than pushing us to correct a growing bad practice? And what exactly can we do to improve on our poor literacy standards? Time certainly seems to be a problem – we all have busier lifestyles, and emphasis is placed on getting results – quickly. However, is a quick result really worth it, if we are filling our online spaces with rubbish?

If you’re a regular Internet user, you’ll know how frustrating it can be to spend hours wading through ‘filler’ to get to the information that you really need – certainly, Google are working hard to improve the quality of online data. However, the onus really is on us – the people creating the online content. Yes, the old adage is true, time is money, but perhaps we should all learn to slow down, just a bit, to avoid these potentially costly mistakes.

Is text speak taking over the world?

If you have a profile on Facebook, Twitter or Myspace, you will no doubt have encountered ‘text speak’. In fact, it’s very hard to miss – more and more people seem to be adopting this strange new way of ‘talking’ online. And it’s not a new occurrence, from the minute we could send texts via our mobiles, we looked for further ways to abbreviate our communications (txt anyone?)

Now text speak is invading our online profiles – are we really getting to the point where we are too lazy to write full sentences? OK, so it can be a quicker way to get your point across – however, unless you’re part of the ‘text generation’ (i.e. under the age of 30) – it can all get a bit confusing. It seems like a new word is being invented every day – or at least an abbreviation of an existing word – so who can blame us for getting our IMAOs and LMAOs confused?

The most amusing instance of text speak can be found in reports generated by recruitment agencies and HR professionals. Recent studies have revealed that many candidates are now listing ‘texting’ as a hobby, and a small number of applicants have actually used text speak abbreviations on their application forms! In a particularly difficult job market, it’s maybe not the best impression that you can give to a potential employer!

With all of this word chopping are we are slowly losing grip of traditional English altogether? What’s next – will we be using text speak as a replacement for verbal communications? OK, so that may be a slight exaggeration, but you get my point. In an increasingly online world, text speak is a trend that may well continue for many years to come. And perhaps it is possible for ‘text speak’ and ‘normal speak’ to live together harmoniously?

So, rather than getting annoyed by this new occurrence, it may be an idea to just embrace it. It’s unlikely that text speak will take over the world and replace traditional English any day soon (although an increasing number of abbreviations seem to be entering the English dictionary of late), so take a breath, exhale and LOL.

Paper print vs. new technology

No doubt you’ve already joined the online revolution – millions of us now have a multitude of online social networking profiles and websites. We can even read the latest news stories online – virtually every major magazine and paper across the globe now has their own website. This shift in media forms has made marketing more accessible than ever to the masses – but what does this mean for the humble paper copy?

Rewind only a few decades and paper copy was the number one option for marketing and information distribution. From newspapers to leaflets, paper copy seemed to be everywhere – and perhaps it still is to some degree. However, as we continue to learn the huge marketing power of the Internet, more and more people are choosing to market their business or services online.

Online literature has its advantages of course – Internet-based copy can easily be edited and changed to reflect the times we are living in. It’s also a more permanent option – leaflets can easily be thrown away, but online copy has a much longer shelf life. Printing costs can also be reduced using online copy, saving companies money in a somewhat difficult financial climate. But would we really like to see the end of all paper copy altogether?

The majority of people would agree that there’s room for both options in the modern world. There’s no doubt that online marketing is on the increase, and this trend is unlikely to slow down in the near future. Certainly, the figures we are seeing would prove that it is a viable and cost-effective marketing strategy. Online communications allow us to reach a larger customer base and have helped us to open up global communications on a whole new level.

But there are still many people who prefer paper or ‘hard’ copy. In an online age, we tend to forget that not everyone is on the Internet. Yes, a large majority of us are, but many still rely on traditional methods to catch up on news and read about new products and services. Even if you are online, the likelihood is that you still buy your favourite magazine or newspaper in hard copy. And why is this? – it’s because you prefer it that way! So, in conclusion, perhaps we haven’t seen the last of paper copy just yet – there seems to be room for both options in the foreseeable future.

What’s in a name?

If you’ve ever started a new business, or have been involved in the re-branding of a product or service, you’ll know the problems that name generation can cause. Competition in today’s financial climate is fierce – you need a company/brand name that will really stand out from the crowd. We are told that a name should be unique and applicable to the services that we are providing – the problem is, most of the ‘great’ names have already been taken! The entire process can be very frustrating – you can spend days, weeks or even months searching for the right name, to no avail.

Many people will ask – “what’s in a name?” and “is it really that important?” Of course, the most important aspect of any business is the quality of the products and/or services that you are selling. However, choosing the right company name can certainly help, especially when it comes to the marketing of your business. In an increasingly online world, keywords are becoming more and more important. There are literally millions of websites available online and using the correct keywords can make the difference between success and failure.

When starting a new business, many people will choose a generic name – i.e. ‘Bob’s Builders’ – yes, it does what it says on the tin, but how many other companies are called exactly the same thing? Legally, you may be able to use the name, but are you up against strong competition online and in directory listings? Others will decide to be more creative i.e. they will use a name that doesn’t necessarily describe their key services. This ploy has worked for many companies, here are a few examples; ‘Apple’, ‘Amazon’ and ‘Firebox’ – none of these names directly describe a product or service, but most people will have heard of at least one of them.

So, how can you pick the very best name for your business, and does it really matter anyway? Yes, it’s important to get it right, the last thing that you want is a name change further down the line, creating further expenses. Brainstorming seems to be the best solution – when you are generating your new name, ask for input from other staff members, family, friends or the general public. Some of the most famous names around have been a result of such collaborations.

Also think about your marketing literature and website when you are creating a name, it’s a common error to create overly-long names, then have problems actually fitting them onto your business cards. Your name will be used on all literature and communications going forward, so take a little time to consider your options before jumping in – the time that you spend now will be rewarded in the future!

Small Business Lessons from Google

Google dominates the Internet. Their search engine is a universally used and understood tool. Most of us don’t even understand the scope of Google’s business ventures.

Google started off (in 1998) and continues with this mission: “organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. And, as you’ll see in the video below, they say every decision is based on that. But, as an example of a key takeaway for small businesses from Google, they have ventured into a variety of technologies and businesses that don’t seem to fit with their mission.

What else can your business learn from this behemoth?

• Make your name synonymous with what you do. Google went from a company name to a verb-brilliant branding, brilliant business building. Google it!
• Fail fast and often. Google likes quick launches and to tweak issues as they go. They consider every failure a learning experience-which is great advice for anyone, let alone small businesses.
• Don’t ask “why?”. Ask “why not?”
• Aim big-then aim bigger. Really? Google Earth? It doesn’t get much bigger than that.
• Keep looking for and developing diverse revenue streams. At first Google AdWords was not seriously considered-now it is their biggest money maker.
• Continually look for ways to improve what you do best and are known for.

Ratio7 is known for creating exceptional work on time and on budget in a variety of ways.

What You Can Learn from Apple

Of all the breakout companies in the technology/innovation economy of the last 30 years, Apple stands alone and small business owners and non-profits can learn a great deal from Apple’s success story:

• Don’t overlook small details. The iPad2 has been deemed less impressive than the awesome SmartCover designed for it.
• Keep things simple. Apple’s most successful products (iPod, iPhone and the iPad) are all very minimal. Look around your workplace, at processes and products at what you can eliminate vs. add.
• Develop a cult-like community. Apple’s customers don’t just feel like customers. They feel like they belong to something larger. Kiva is a great example of a non-profit whose international online community of contributers interact heavily in forums.
• It isn’t necessary to play nice with everyone. iTunes doesn’t mesh with all other tech providers, Apple has refused Adobe Flash for iPads/iPhones. Apple is notorious for not creating partnerships with other companies (unlike Google). Or perhaps it is better to say they are incredibly picky in those partnerships-and that is the takeaway and part of what creates that insulated sense of community.
• Design matters. Of course, we at Ratio7 believe that strongly, but the world of design is getting increasing notice and there is little doubt that Apple’s clean, distinctive product designs, and logo, have lead that wave of attention.

What’s Important to Ratio7

In speaking with a potential client about what she is looking for in a graphic design/web development firm, she said “it’s important to know what’s important to that firm, what they are doing and working on”. I thought this was a great idea for a post. Here are some thoughts on what makes Ratio7′s team tick and thrive:

First, and foremost, we are driven by our Christian values and beliefs. This is what fuels us to deliver our very best, in an ethical, honest fashion. This also motivates our commitment to giving back through the Ratio Foundation.

We love supporting companies who give back as well like this great organisation, and this one. And we LOVE, LOVE, LOVE being part of your success!

We know that creativity requires curiosity and learning and staying on top of technology trends. We read a lot, we interact with other designers and tech-y professionals, and we pay deep attention to our clients’ needs (including budget and timelines).

Flexibility is important to us, so we employ a broad variety of creatives, both on-staff and freelancers, so we can meet specific needs nimbly.

Of course, in addition to faith, humour, family, friendship and COFFEE are important to keeping us happy, alive and fueled! What’s important to YOU?

Going Green

Ratio7 has a strong ethical sensibility that incorporates our Christian values and our business integrity. We also are acutely aware of sustainability and the need to green our business and to help clients green theirs, as well as to successfully promote the fact that they are considering this important step. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it is also a valuable marketing tool. But you want to use it sensitively.

Begin by asking clients, staff and leadership what changes they want to make to increase sustainability. Several meetings with key stakeholders will be necessary to narrow down the list from what everyone wants to do to what is feasible to do first, from a logistics, affordability and impact standpoint. You can start with something as small as installing recycle bins by each trash bin, by buying recycled computer paper and by improving energy efficiency in basic ways (replacing traditional bulbs with CFL bulbs).

A helpful tool is to draft a sustainability mission statement and incorporate measurable goals. Keep your website and intranet, if you have one, updated with what changes your company is making. This will increase search engine traffic when potential customers look for sustainable companies. Adding a green or nature-themed side or bottom banner with “sustainability improvement updates” or similar is an excellent way of both informing your customers and marketing yourself as a company that is environmentally aware. Doing this with integrity is key. You’ve got to walk the walk, even if it is just small changes. Just as it is important to inform potential clients about your charitable work, it is also important to keep them informed about your “greening”.

If improving your company’s impact on the environment is a goal, reach out to us. We’ll work with you to convey this message in a tasteful, yet useful way!

Mini-Sites: Big Tool, Small Site

Not every company or organisation needs a full-fledged, multi-page website with lots of features. There are times that a min-site will serve your purpose and Ratio7 has created many of these for clients. What we created for Somewhereto is a useful example of the powerful and streamlined approach that you might need versus a full website. In this case, Live Union wanted a unique site to promote a series of events they were producing for their client. Instead of a page in an existing site that might not get the notice they wanted, it made more sense to create a small, separate site to get the word out about the events.  Your company or charity might consider this for an annual event or fundraiser, linking the mini-site with separate URL to your main site.

Another common mini-site is a sales or landing page. Generally just one page that promotes a unique product or service, it links to your main site and has sales copy, product information and an order form, all with a unique URL that will drive additional search engine traffic.

Finally, it could just be that your business or organisation has no need for a multi-page, feature rich site. You might just want a simple, one page mini-site that presents a basic bio of your company and team and contact information.

While Ratio7 creates beautiful, deep, feature-laden sites routinely, we don’t want you to think we are a “one size fits all” creative team! Our designers work with you to determine YOUR needs and can create a site, big or small, that fits those needs, budget and timeline. So, before you dismiss the idea of a site as to expensive, talk to us. You might find a mini-site is all you need.

Repurposing Your Video

We do video. We do it great! And so, when you have a finished product from us promoting your event, your brand or telling the story of your company, we want you to maximize it. Video ranks higher in search engine marketing (notice how those YouTube videos are up near the top on Google?) and also can be more compelling, especially in mobile viewers like tablets and smartphones. What are some ways to repurpose your company’s or organisation’s video?

Definitely put it online. If you don’t have a YouTube account, open one and load your videos there. Vimeo is another popular site and both will help your search engine rankings.

Add it to your website and/or blog. A home page video greeting is a welcoming addition and adds a strong visual element for your visitors. It can be used to both inform and educate potential customers, volunteers or donors. Do make sure there is a stop/mute button on the video so viewers can turn off if it is inconvenient.

Put it in your press kit. A DVD copy of your video tells a story in a more compelling way than just adding text and graphic print pieces for journalists.

Use it in your marketing efforts. Take it to potential customers and donors and drop off (DVD reproduction is inexpensive) for them to view after you’ve made your in-person pitch.

Play it in your company or organisation’s office on a rotating loop so visitors can view while they wait. Consider having a variety of videos so it doesn’t get overly repetitive.

Ratio7 can create a compelling, entertaining video for your charity, business or event. We have expert videographers on staff who will help you tell a rich, engaging story about your organisation.

A Typography Primer

Typography is essentially print styles. Artists and graphic designers and writers see styles everywhere but you may not realize the impact typography has on you and your business message or design intent. However, at Ratio7, we are trained to advise you on which typography style supports and amplifies the message you actually want to send.

Generally speaking, there are two broad categories of typography: serif and sans serif, serif being the little “feet” that letters rest on and sans meaning “without”. The most common of these two types are Times New Roman (serif)  and Arial (sans serif).

In the beginning of the Web days it was felt by most copywriters and web designers/developers that digital medium was best displayed in sans serif font. In fact, you could kind of identify an amateur if they were using a serif type on a website. Boy! Have those days changed!

Generally speaking, serif fonts like Times New Roman or Courier are considered more formal, weighty, serious and traditional. Sans serif, obviously, are considered more casual, cleaner, “cutting-edge” and youthful. However, as soon as you state that, there is an example of someone who has used the opposite-like Ratio7!

The newest trend, seen on sites like Wired.com, is to pair the two: sans serif for headers and contant wtih serif for titles. Yet, if you pick up the magazine itself you would likely see more serif fonts because it is in print.

Before stepping out on a branding path, or if you are considering revisiting your site or graphic presence, be sure to discuss typography with your designer. If you want a bit more (actually a lot more) typography education, you might check out the documentary “Helvetica”.

Does Print Matter?

Printed materials (newspapers, magazines, books, newsletters, etc.) are the stuff of much debate these days. Graphic designers, including those of us here at Ratio7, have had to learn and adapt quickly to the Web and digital age. And we’ve happily succeeded! But we still do print, despite the naysayers saying it is dead, or dying. Why?

Not everyone has an iPad! Sure they have plenty of smartphones, but even the largest of those requires squinting to absorb media that is easy to manage in print. Granted, we redesign websites for smartphones and that will continue and grow, but for viewing most text-driven media, smartphones are just too small.

A magazine is cheap to lose if you drop it in the tub. So is a book or newspaper. And people read in the tub, on the beach and on boats, risking ruining an expensive digital device if they have a mishap.

Some print materials are ok to be left lying around for strangers. Postcards for events, stickers, newsletters all are easier to distribute randomly than digital material via email-which generally requires “opt-in” permission and a way to find your recipients. Where would bands be without flyers?

Finally, there is something about print. A tangible, tactile feel that many people cannot imagine ever giving up since we’ve been using print on paper-type products since papyrus gained popularity around 300o BC. Print has texture, artwork, portability and a sense of ownership that an e-book doesn’t really offer.

Ratio7 believes there will ALWAYS be a place for print. If you agree and have a need, let us know!

Best iPhone/iPad Creativity Apps

Applications (apps) are changing the world. In fact, a recent article says that the smartphone is actually more a personal computer than the PC actually ever was. By the end of 2011, the majority of cell phone users will be using smartphones. And now that iPads and it’s competitors are so popular, there are apps for everything! 300,000 options at last count. Here are some of our favorite creativity apps:

• Sketchbook Mobile/Sketchbook Pro: Made by Autodesk, the creator/owner of AutoCAD, this app offers professional grade painting and drawing on the iPhone/iPad. TONS of features for on-the-go creating at a professional level
• Draw: Pretty basic with colored pencils and an eraser, it still allows for instant creativity AND allows you to Tweet or email your creations
• Brushes: Brushes is a painting app designed specifically for iPhone/iPad with a variety of brushes and a nifty color picker
• Hipstamatic: This photography app has spawned flickr groups and contests. Offers a variety of lenses to allow you to take photos that have a unique vintage feel. The corresponding website is brilliant as well!
• ShakeItPhoto: Allows you to turn any iPhone photo into a Polaroid image by shaking your phone. Way cool!
• CameraBag: Offers a variety of lenses to change your iPhone photos into different tones like black and white, sepia, silver, plastic camera, and even different years like 1962 and 1974 photo styles! A whole lotta fun!

Honestly, we could really keep going for a long time sharing fun and creative apps, but we’d rather hear from you! What are your favorites? What are we missing?

Successfully Name Your Business

A catchy, memorable business name is the starting point for an eye-catching logo. While a poorly imagined name won’t necessarily kill or stifle your business, great business or product names can spread more easily and help your customers find you more easily. Can you imagine Google as anything different?

A great business name can be informative as well as catchy, letting clients know instantly what business you are in (Microsoft-software). There are experts in this field and, as you come up with a logo design, Ratio7 can certainly work with you on finding a name that supports a logo and marketing strategy.

Somethings to consider when naming a business or product:

• Start off by identifying your idea customer and what you want to say to them
• Generally, the shorter the better. American Telephone and Telegraph became AT&T
• Avoid putting a location in your name (Hertfordshire News and Books) in case you move out of the area or expand
• Consider your name’s search engine friendliness-the more unique, the easier to find
• Think of the emotions or status you want your business name to convey: peace? excitement? curiousity? youth? maturity?
• Before meeting with a designer or professional naming company, brainstorm a very broad list so you have something to work off of
• When considering the potential name, do consider the potential logo and if it will be labor-intensive to design
• Use root words (Intel=intelligence) to build off of
• Be prepared to do a trademark search to make sure your name isn’t already in use
• Consider browsing stock photos of nearly anything to stir creativity (landscapes, people, business photography are all good choices)

If you need help and are ready to get to work, Ratio7 would love to be your design partner for the long-term. Working with startups is one of our specialties!

Colour Trends for the Web

Colour trends vary by genre: home decor, fashion, automotive and, not surprisingly, digital media. Like fashion, certain colours and colour combinations are often in or out, hip or passe’. Who can forget peach and teal from the 1980′s or burgundy and hunter green from the 1990′s? But, like fashion, certain colours and combinations gain new popularity because of their retro feel.

Some colours have staying power and what your digital media needs to say and who it needs to reach is often affected by these standards. Red=power and confidence. Navy or grey=tradition. Green=organic (and now, sustainable). E-commerce sites for little girls are nearly uniformly pink.Generally speaking, you can’t go wrong with some of these colours in graphic design if your business needs to send one of these messages.

But if you need to re-brand or start a brand based on the cutting edge, current trends, here are some suggestions:

Vintage Wine per Benjamin Moore

Lemon Citrus Yellow from Colour Futures

Organic Meets Industrial (think soft green and silver or brown and copper)

Retro (yes folks, keep your eyes open for both turquoise, burgundy and hunter green)

Colour is trending a bit more muted, less electric orange and citron green and, instead, more soft clay-like colours.

Keep in mind. Colour, like branding, needs to be updated periodically. Consumers eyes grow accustomed and they stop seeing your logo after many years. A great way to re-brand is through the use of new contemporary colours. If you feel that your business needs a new look to signify new growth or to attract a new demographic of customers, contact Ratio7 for a free consultation. Our web and digital media designers understand the message that colour sends and how it translates onto computer,  television and mobile screens.

Is Your Site Ready for Mobile?

Smartphones are ruling the technology roost. More than 2.5 billion will be sold worldwide between 2010-2015 and by next year, smartphones will be the most common form of mobile phone in use. This means a vast majority of your customers and web visitors will be visiting via their mobile phones and a computer. But is your website ready?

If you go to companies like Amazon.com and Yahoo on a smartphone, you will find that the site looks different than it does on a computer. Their sites, and those of many other companies, large and small, are configured to be more user-friendly on a mobile device and tablets like iPads. Considering how many people are going to be viewing your site or blog this way, it makes sense to have a graphic design re-tool it for mobile.

Ratio7 is experienced in these redesigns and understands the importance of capturing the most necessary features of your site for the mobile version while maintaining a strong and visually appealing design. We’ll help you determine how this mobile site should look and function and do it within your budget and time frame.

Don’t let the mobile world pass your company by! Contact us for a free evaluation and estimate for a mobile conversion.

WordPress SEO Plugins: Ratio 7′s Top 10

Ratio7 loves WordPress for clients, not just because it is user-friendly for designers, but because it is user-friendly for, well, users AND Google and other search engines love it. They also have handy little bits of code, called ‘plugins’ that are easy to install to customize your site. If you are a Ratio7 customer, we take care of these for you! For search engine optimisation, these plugins are the best:

Scribe. Scribe is not free. It is from the same developers who’ve created the very popular (premium) theme “Thesis” and is a handy keyword/SEO analysis tool for bloggers. It scores your post for SEO-friendliness, guides you in making improvements and, for heavy duty blogging, is invaluable.

All-In-One SEO Pack is a really popular free plug-in which creates “meta tags” (little snippets of code that the search engines use to crawl, i.e. read) for your content, title and keywords.

Platinum SEO Plugin helps you avoid duplicate content, offers permanent and temporary page redirects (301 and 302 respectively) and also generates meta tags.

SEO Friendly Images: Images make your blog more enjoyable but it also adds another avenue for search engines to find your page. This plugin helps you with adding title tags and keywords to your images.

SEO Tag Cloud plugin allows you to create a cloud that search engines will actually search.

Sitemap Generator is an important plugin. Search engine crawlers like to crawl a neat, organized site map and this plugin helps you with categories, pages and more.

SEO Smart Links is a plugin that takes care of an important part of blogging: interlinking (linking to other pages within your blog) which can be time consuming. This plugin does the heavy lifting for you.

HeadSpace2 is another meta data plugin that helps you create custom titles, tags, and descriptions to improve page ranking.

wpSEO does what many of the other SEO plugins do but also allows you to add an SEO monitor as a dashboard widget, renames files to make them more SE friendly upon upload and prevents indexing of RSS feeds by search engines.

W3 Total Cache improves the speed and overall performance of your WordPress site. Thus, impatient search engine crawlers are likely to spend more time finding content on your site which improves optimization and page rankings.

XML Sitemaps: Google Likes Them

Google XML Sitemap? Ugh. Running a small business involves managing thousands of details, many of which you don’t know much about. Ratio7 understands that (we’re a small business too!) and we have your back. Managing your WordPress site is a science in and of itself and its most important purpose is to attract new customers. There is a lot of data in a site and some of it is behind-the-scenes stuff that is important to search engines. Of course the king of search engines is Google and Google likes a sitemap.

What’s a sitemap? It’s exactly what it sounds like-a map of your site. Luckily, you don’t have to build or design one! There are plugins (tiny pieces of code that are available to add to your site) that will build this sitemap for you. When Ratio7 or any other reputable designer builds your site, it should be installed for you.

Why is it important? Without a sitemap, Google can overlook content, links, and entire pages of your site. A sitemap helps point Google (and other search engines like Yahoo) to the appropriate information on your site and, thus, improves your search engine results and traffic.

Ratio7 offers WordPress set up, theme design and customisation and will get your blog and site up and running quickly and affordably. We know which plugins are crucial to improve your traffic and your WordPress site’s functionality. Let us know if we can help!

Do you have any tips on how they should set up and run the website?

Our advice here is: take what you do best and to it online. When people come to your shop, what they often want more than anything is your knowledge and experience. If you can give them the benefit of your wisdom on your website, you will be able to promote your pharmacy as THE place to go for reliable information and the perfect cure.

Consider starting a blog. This is a place on your website where you can write little ‘posts’ (like short diary entries) that could highlight new developments in medicine, or underline the need for, say, different dietary suppliments at certain times of the year. Not only will this keep promoting your business, it will also help keep your site higher up the list in the Google search.

Increasingly we are building customers websites on platforms that were traditionally developed for blog sites. This means that it gives you complete access to your own site once it is up and running, and complete freedom to make regular changes without having to go back to the designer for every little change, saving you time and money.
Many people shy away from the commitment needed for this more regular involvement with their website. They hope that they can simply build it, park it and then wait for the customers to come flooding in. Unfortunately life doesn’t work like that and nor do websites. It can take a bit of getting into, but your efforts will pay dividends. Think of it like starting a diary, but a diary that many people will read. Don’t forget that, because of your training and specialism, even your musings on the latest piece of research or your view on the best remedy for the common cold, will be revelatory to most of us mere mortals. And remember, this advice will be available any time of day or night. In fact it will be available at the very moment that your customer needs it. What better service could you hope to offer?

What should I consider before starting up a website?

Keep it simple. One of the main mistakes people still make when planning their website is to dress to impress, to wow people into sitting up and taking notice. This is almost always a mistake. Your site is not there to say ‘Hey, look at me!’ but ‘How can I help?’ If people want to be entertained, they can turn on the tele. If they’ve got a sick toddler, they want good information quickly – even if that information is just ‘Where can I find a chemist at three o’clock in the morning?’

You are effectively in the information business. Your site should be information led, not technology led. Of course, at the end of the information process, you do need people to buy something, but, in our experience, people will almost certainly buy if they believe they have been given the information they need.
When talking to a web designer, by wary of anyone trying to sell you fancy bells and whistles, flash animations and gimmicks. Your site, like your shop, needs to be clearly labeled and easy to move around in. We often have to talk clients out of building more glamorous sites, even if we receive lower fees in the process. These sites can seem exciting to begin with, but people soon get bored and even irritated by these sites if they have to keep returning to them and have to keep waiting while pretty graphic features need to load. Let’s face it, we all want people to keep returning to our website. Anything that might put them off has to be avoided.

Be clear what you want out of your site. Ask yourself what you want people to do while they are there. Do you want them to buy things? Do you want to encourage them to pop into your shop more often? Do you want to make sure they think of you the next time they need advice? Once you are sure of your objectives, a good web designer will be able to give you a clear understanding of the time and cost to build what you need.

What can a business gain from a website?

This is a sensible first question but what if you asked yourself the opposite one: What can my business loose by not having a website? No-one is quite sure when it happened, but sometime in the second half of the last decade the World Wide Web stopped feeling new and became simply ‘there’. Just another given. A fact of life like a landline or a bank account. There was a time when only a very few people had telephone lines and the rest of us still sent good old fashioned letters. Today, if your business didn’t have a phone number, you would seem somehow suspect, possibly even a bit dodgey. It’s getting a bit like that with websites. When we now want to find a pharamcy the first place many will look is online. If you are not there, you could well loose business, even if you are not directly selling online.

If you are actually wanting to trade online, the local pharmacy without a website is definitely missing a trick. As you know, many of the products you sell are of a very personal nature and buying online could avoid that awkward moment when the customer has to mumble their barely audible order for Haemorrhoid cream. Many medicines are offered online and we all know about the emails offering cheap viagra that daily clog up our spam filters. The ability to order non-perscription drugs from a local pharmacist you know and trust seems like a perfect business opportunity simply ripe for the picking.

Colour: A Complicated Concept

Colour is a crucial element in graphic design, whether digital (the Web) or analog (print). Colour in design is a surprisingly complex issue. There are a variety of different colour models used in graphic design but the most common are RGB (Red, Green and Blue) and CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and keyBlack). When these colour models are used in print, textiles or online, all of the colours in them are built from those 3 or 4 base colours!

Different companies have their own proprietary versions of these two colour models. Pantone, one of the largest color matching systems used (those paint swatches from the store are generally based on Pantone’s system), is based on CMYK and Adobe uses an RGB system.

As if that weren’t complicated enough, web designers use six digit hexidecimal codes to accurately identify colours! For instance, white is #FFFFFF. These codes ensure that a colour shows up on your computer as close as possible to what the designer intended.

Do you need to know this? Probably not. But you should know that your graphic design team at Ratio7, whether developing print or Web materials, take their colour very seriously! Different colours convey different messages and colours, like fashion, go in and out. Print magazine, one of the most popular graphic design magazines, has determined this shade of orange-pink to be particularly trendy right now. Remember hunter green and burgundy of the 1980′s or pink appliances from the 1960′s? Mauve is a colour that died a cold hard death (and will likely be resurrected under a completely different name!).

Trust your Hertfordshire’s Ratio7 designers to steer you in the right direction when it comes to colour!

Branding: It’s All About Emotion

Branding is a funny little term that means so much. Your company’s culture, its image, what it wants to convey, how it wants to entice is all part part of “branding”. But the most important part of branding is the emotion it wants to evoke in the viewer and potential customer.

A great film for all business owners about to work with an advertising or branding company like Ratio7 is Art & Copy. The film is advertising 101 in a sense and helps businesses understand what emotions their design firm is trying to pull from them and work with them to convey in their audience. Great brand strategies like Nike’s Just Do It and the original Apple MacIntosh 1984-style commercial are all covered. What do they have in common? Emotion.

When working with you on branding, logo and web design, video production or print, Ratio7 knows that you need to get your message across and will encourage you to consider the various emotions that will stir your audience: intrigue, connection, laughter, curiosity, contentment, confidence, reassurance, enlightenment, security. All of these are common feelings that companies try to inspire in their customers and we understand how emotionally compelling storytelling helps you do that.

When meeting with your graphic designer for the first time, consider what you want your potential customers and audience to feel. When you stir an emotion or solve a problem, you build brand loyalty. We understand this and will help you find the answers that suit your company best!

Ratio7 Rocks! Video Production

Smart phones have taken the world by storm and, coupled with tablets, are changing the way businesses market and sell their products and services. Video is crucial now because it is easier to view on these technologies than text content and because video ranks higher in search engine results.

While you can certainly do short amateur videos with your personal handheld camera, true results come from a higher quality production. Your Ratio7 video team in Hertfordshire works with you and expertly films and edits your video to the highest standards and delivers on time. And because the costs associated with video production have steadily declined, we can work within most budgets.

Our production team understands set up, lighting and sound and has the equipment to do justice to your video. Editing is equally important and our video editors have years of experience in helping produce the highest quality video promotional materials.

What should you use video for?

• Filming products (particularly good for apparel)
• Tours of your facility or storefront
• Interviews with staff
• Traditional commercials
• Entertainment
• Customer testimonials

We have the know-how and experience to create high-quality, engaging videos for your company. If you aren’t sure what you want or you just want to explore the possibilities, don’t hesitate to contact Ratio7 for a free consultation.

What’s Your Website’s Purpose?

Whether you are having a site built by scratch or doing a redesign of your existing site, it is really important to examine the reasons you have a website at all. Sound obvious? It isn’t. If you look at your own favorite sites, you will find that they serve many different purposes. For a graphics team like Ratio7 to build you exactly what you want and need for your business’s website, you need to explore the various types of sites and determine which one suits your business goals. A site may have several purposes at once.

The most basic site is informational. This is a site that tells a potential customer or visitor what your business is, where it’s located, its hours, how to contact you and maybe a bit more. These sites are fast and easy to construct and usually only involve a page or two. All sites have some basic information on them.

The next is a site that educates and/or is used as a reference. It might be a site like Wikipedia or Grammar Girl with information on everything or just on grammar and writing. Or it could be a health site with information on conditions or illnesses.

Some sites are inspirational. They provide you with stories and photography and music on various topics like personal development, spirituality, psychology and new age practices.

Promotional sites are also common. They generally promote a celebrity, a rock band, an author, a product and more.

Then there are those that entertain. While YouTube certainly has educational and inspirational purposes, it is most often turned to for its entertainment value. Most humour sites like Funny or Die and LOLCats are both highly trafficked and entertaining.

Finally, there are e-commerce sites. These sites exist primarily to sell you something. Amazon.com is one. Ebay is another. The best e-commerce sites combine many of the features of other sites (education, entertainment, etc.).

Knowing what your end goal is can help the exceptional team at Hertfordshire’s Ratio7 design or retool your site to be the most efficient, exciting, and popular site possible! Let us know how we can help.

E-book Design

E-books are all the rage. Increasingly people are getting their information online or via devices like Amazon’s Kindle and e-books are perfect for this. They are also a great way to market yourself as an expert. You can write an e-book yourself or work with a ghostwriter and pay to have it done. Either way, one of the things that is key is having a great “cover” design when it you are ready to make it available for download.

One of the important details of marketing your e-book is to design a cover that is eye-catching and very “book like”. A great graphic designer will help you choose a cover that conveys what your book is about, looks professional, and doesn’t look cheap. While some details of a real book cover and an e-book cover will overlap, they are distinctly different.

E-book covers are not incredibly difficult for a designer so turnaround time is generally quick. They are also pretty affordable. Your designer will spend some time discussing the content of the book and then work with you on whether you want a traditional, modern or whimsical design. They can incorporate your existing logo or design something totally unique. However, those individuals who have sold e-books DO feel the cover is important in creating interest in their product. Ratio7 would love to work with you on a unique design. Feel free to contact us for more information!

Video Promotion and Ratio7

Whether you are a small business or a solo brand, promotional videos offer something to your customer that they can’t get any other way. A video brings your business and your brand to life, allowing customers the ability to connect and experience you and what you offer in an authentic manner. There are a variety of ways to use promotional video as part of your marketing strategy.

But, before you start using video, it is imperative that you have video that is professional in quality. Experts in videography know more about lighting, sound, angles, focus and overall quality than your average user and they use higher-quality equipment. Additionally, proper editing with titles, fades and effects is crucial.

Videos should be included in your company or personal press kit. As an introduction to who you are, what you do and why the media would be interested, it is a brilliant add-on to the general materials included in the traditional press kit.

Video can and should be embedded on your website or blog. Whether these are instructional or a walk-through of your business, they give the viewer first hand knowledge of what you offer. If they are instructional, the potential customer is instantly rewarded for having found your link!

Video can be used inside the business on television screens. Whether they video cast studies of your work with past clients, an interview with the CEO or video of company events, it offers those visitors waiting in your lobby information (and entertainment) that makes your organization feel more alive and engaging.

Finally, for business owners or solo entrepreneurs, more individuals are adding video to sites like Facebook and LinkedIn business pages. Acting as a form of a visual resume, you can provide an introduction that encourages others to connect with you online.

Ratio7 offers professional video editing and production at an affordable price. Feel free to contact us for more information.

E-commerce and User Experience

If you have an online, e-commerce site or section to your site, there are things you can do to make it really work for you and generate more income than it currently is. Online shopping is all about a great UX (user experience). It must be super-easy, answer questions up front and make the check out experience should be flawless.

Great photography of products is crucial. Don’t use your own photography if it looks amateur. It is affordable to hire professionals for this. You should have up-close shots of some items so shoppers can get a close look at things like fabric.

The written descriptions are very important as well. Don’t count on your shoppers to get all of their information from a photograph. A full description, including dimensions when appropriate, helps them make their decision and answers questions up front.

There should be a variety of categories and they should be clearly defined and intuitive. Sizes and colors should be obvious. If a size or color isn’t available, it should be absent as a choice or in gray tones so you can clearly see it is unavailable. It is helpful if an alternative is offered.

Allowing customers to rate products is very useful and has helped make Amazon.com what it is today. It may seem like this could hurt sales, but overall it provides both you and the customer information into the perceived value and quality of a product. Poor reviews can help you determine what products to discontinue.

Sales should be announced boldly on your main page and on the appropriate individual product page, as well as being accurately given at check out. And the check out process should be seamless. DO NOT require customers to fill out a profile before purchasing. You can encourage it but do not make it a requirement. Anything you put in their way can be a deterrent to purchasing.

Ratio7 can help you set up an e-commerce site, or improve your existing one. We offer professional photography, design, copy writing and tech support! Call us for a free consultation.

Online Forums: Get Readers Talking

Back in the early days of the Internet, user groups were all the rage. Then social networking began and forums like Yahoo Groups seemed to take a backseat to these slick new sites like Facebook and MySpace. In reality, there are literally hundreds of thousands of member forums and they are a great way to create buzz and interact with customers and members.

If you have a niche web site, adding forums where users can discuss various aspects of your topic or product is a great way to build community and relationships. You need to be an active moderator, especially in the beginning, to make members feel heard and responded to. Posting a question that just lingers in cyberspace is not encouraging. Make forum rules really clear and mandate respectfulness. People who “flame” (short for inflame or agitate) others should be barred from the site immediately, as should people who just post spam.

New marketing trends all point to building relationships with your customers and readers. Adding a forum feature to your site is a great way to develop a community and loyal following, giving your readers a voice in how you do business. If you need help adding this feature to your existing site or in developing a membership site with forums from scratch, please let us know.

Leverage That Logo!

Many companies use their logos in very traditional ways (signage, letterhead, business cards, online branding), but new and exciting ways of using your logo are popping up. You may have heard of Jason Sadler and his I Wear Your Shirt endeavour? Companies are paying him to wear their logos on a t-shirt. It is brilliant concept and certainly a different kind of marketing strategy for a business!

Temporary tattoos have increased in popularity recently. If you have a company with a hip focus or one that markets to children and young people, you can purchase temporary tattoos of your logo and distribute these as a “freebie” for people to wear. Every time someone sees the tattoo, it is free marketing for you.

Stickers have a real cult following! People are putting stickers everywhere as a form of “tagging” like graffiti. Now, we don’t recommend that you break any laws, but offering stickers for convention or seminar attendees (who love “schwag”) can be a great way to get mileage out of your logo. There are also removable window decals for cars.

With Christmas approaching, consider giving away company ornaments. Many businesses put up trees and your logo on an ornament could catch someone’s eye. Another surprising affordable interesting item are jump or flash drives. There are also Swiss Army style tools.

Provide your employees with logo gear as well! Every time they wear that t-shirt or use the umbrella they received, they are marketing your business.

Make sure your logo is fresh and eye-catching. If you need rebranding or a new logo, feel free to contact us.

Content is King!

Part of branding and web design is the text on the page, but it is usually completely overlooked or dismissed as unimportant. Not so! In the world of advertising, it is often said that “content is king”. Content are your words in a brochure, sales letter, on a blog or website, advertisement or even a business card. Strong copywriters have become increasingly in demand as the online world has developed. Now, in addition to having words that grab attention, copywriters must know how to get your site seen by search engines and thus be schooled in search engine optimization.

Copy writing must be clear, engaging, tailored to the medium (print or online), tailored to the audience and free of errors. A copywriter knows how to use headlines, whitespace, and formatting plus keywords to attract search engine “crawlers” and readers and to keep them reading for as long as possible. A good copywriter understands your industry and what makes your business unique, as well as the need to encourage readers to take the next step (sign up, return this form, contact us).

Ratio7 employs expert copywriters who help build and promote your brand. As part of our team, they learn your business and your unique attributes. When choosing a graphic design firm, don’t neglect to inquire about their copy writing expertise. Content is king!

Advertising On Your Website

Advertising on a blog or website is a way to generate additional income, even if it was designed to market your own services or business. You can refer business to other sites and get a potential commission for the sales. This is referred to as “affiliate marketing” and can end up earning you some significant cash! The most well-known affiliate program is Amazon.com’s Associate program. You can add links or images to your site that go to your account page and earn a commission for any purchases that were directed from your site.

There are affiliate programs for nearly every type of business so it is easy to find companies who’s products are compatible or support yours. For instance, you might sell electronics but not want to deal with the peripherals like extra cords and batteries. You can become an affiliate of a company that does just this and with each sale through your affiliate account, you both benefit! Just do a search for “affiliate programs” and you’ll get more hits than you know what to do with.

If you set up a WordPress site, you can have banner ad placeholders added in on development and either use this for your affiliate marketing companies or you can sell this space like a classified in a newspaper. Be sure to ask your designer (hopefully it’s us!) to do this for you.

Ratio7 can help you build in an affiliate program as part of your website design. Contact us here for more information.

The Importance of Whitespace

The average consumers of graphic design (which means all of us!) don’t consider the blank spaces on a site or business card or flyer at all. Designers give this great consideration however. Whitespace (the technical name for blank space, also known as negative space) is as important as your text, colours and images. It is crucial to have the proper balance on a page or site for several reasons.

Your eyes need a place to rest. That seems odd but visually you can be overwhelmed when there is too much going on on a page. We’ve all encountered websites that were just too busy and then information gets lost. Designers always face the challenge of presenting the necessary content without straining the reader.

Whitespace helps important points or images stand out. It says “this is important so it is all we are showing you right here”. Surrounding an image or subject line or logo with whitespace gives it extra “weight” or sense of importance. It is also like a path in a garden…it leads the eye on where to go.

Ratio7 has a team of experienced designers who know how to use the various elements of design to create a print or online presence that captivates your market and conveys your business vision.

WordPress Your Business

WordPress is emerging as the leader of blogging sites and software. For the common user interested in using WordPress, there are some things that can be confusing. Let us clarify some details for you!

1. WordPress.org and WordPress.com are two different entities owned by the same company. The free WordPress.com site is for casual users who do not need or want a full range of customization options for their site. WordPress.org is a free downloaded software that can be fully transformed and used on a HOSTED site. To run a WordPress.org site (the most common choice among business owners), you must have it hosted like a traditional website.

2. You can create a fully functional website that includes a blog via WordPress(.org) software. It allows for pages, custom style sheets, HTML editing and everything else you need in a smaller business website.

3. WordPress (both kinds) offers “themes” which are essentially design templates that are ready to go. You can also download additional free themes, priced themes or have a theme custom made (or tailored) by a designer.

4. WordPress is easier for the average user to modify than a traditional website. Thus its huge popularity.

5. Your designer can seamlessly install WordPress blog software to be compatible with your existing website so you can utilize WP’s easy blog features without a complete website overhaul.

This blog utilizes WordPress and Ratio7 can take care of all of your needs, from the most basic to the most advanced, if you are interested in using this software. Contact us for more information.

5 Ways to Make Print Memorable

We are all consumers who are faced with marketing materials every day. From brochures to leaflets, stickers to business cards, we pick these things up and often discard them before they are ever read. If you are a business owner, this can be a challenge if you want your marketing message to be heard. At Ratio7, we know some ways to help your message stand out and GRAB ATTENTION!

If you are in need of new or upgraded print materials like brochures or business cards, you can get more attention by doing the following things

1. Make it an odd shape. A typical square leaflet or postcard doesn’t stand out at all. Most are pretty uniform and standard in shape or size. But consider what it is like to receive a round postcard or to see a triangular shaped flyer posted somewhere. It stands out immediately because it is so unexpected! A good designer can help you use your logo to do a cut out edge or a whole piece that is built around it.

2. Make it out of a unique material. Designers have access to a large variety of materials, not just paper. Today’s technology allows you to easily print on thin wood, metal, plastic, vellum and various other materials. You can order balloons, stickers and other items to shake things up a bit!

3. Have a tear-off or freebie added. Turn your business card into a magnet, have a free tear-off bookmark, insert a coaster with your business logo. All of these make your marketing message more memorable and allow it to be seen in several different places in a home or office.

4. Use strong, eye-catching colours. More traditional businesses tend to lean on colours like navy and beige which is often appropriate. But if you want to get attention for a younger company with a youthful message, make sure your designer is caught up on colours trends. Neon colours are easy to find in a pile of papers. Few people do really bright business cards. Have your designer draft samples in really bright colours to see what you think.

5. Use powerful, bold words. Don’t let your design firm’s copywriter get away with weak language! A good copywriter understands the importance of persuasive, powerful language that is easily understood. The single word WOW! in large print catches the eye quickly. Make sure your pieces are well-written.

Feel free to contact us for a quote on any of the items mentioned or for other graphic design services!

Make a Creativity Date with Yourself

Sometimes those creativity batteries need to be recharged and a creativity (or artist) date is a fun way to do just that. Originally coined by Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, many people working in a variety of creative endeavors use these dates to fertilize pending ideas and to generate new ones. Sometimes they are helpful just to get a break from the daily grind as well.

A creative or artist date is a commitment to yourself (Cameron recommends weekly, but do what you can) to spend time alone exploring. Whether these are new parts of your city that have intrigued you, new activities (if you work on a computer all day, a better date is spent working with your hands), listening to new types of music, seeing an odd movie, anything that is outside the “norm” for you.

An excellent idea is to give yourself an assignment with a camera. You can commit to as many photographs of the color red, the letter J, rusty cars or graffiti as you can get in a set period of time. Or grab an old stack of magazines and commit to three collages around a theme (or just in general).

Sometimes just silence is enough to get those juices flowing again. When you are a graphic designer, you tend to be on the computer and phone constantly (actually, if you work anywhere that’s likely the case). Getting into a park and experiencing a bit of silence and nature (maybe with a good old fashioned sketchbook) can be tremendously uplifting.

Regardless how you spend it, do schedule these routine appointments with yourself. You, and your clients, deserve it.

Make It Sticky!

In order to make a marketing message memorable, it has to be “sticky”. Made to Stick, a great book by Chip and Dan Heath, offers tips and templates on how to get your marketing messages to stick in the public’s mind. Not only is the book informative, it is engaging and a fun read filled with urban myths and legends that caught fire (but were never true-like dangerous Halloween candy!).

To make a message or idea stick, it needs to be:

• simple (not dumbed-down but containing the core idea+ being compact)
• unexpected (surprises get our attention)
• concrete (abstract concepts are forgotten)
• credible (this is why athletes and celebrities are spokespeople: we consider them trustworthy)
• emotional (make them feel something, anything, even disgust)
• use stories (stories help us recall situations, making the message more real to us)

A great copywriter knows how to create a simple headline that is compelling and how to create copy that relies on all or some of the other techniques that Chip and Dan recommend. At Ratio7, we only employ highly recommended copywriters for your site and print materials. We help make YOUR ideas sticky! Check out the Made to Stick blog here.

Design Buzz

“Design” is a term that has crossed boundaries, from the creative to the practical. You can thank Apple for bringing public awareness to good design and that awareness has now spread to the common consumer. Tim Brown, CEO of branding giant, IDEO has written Change by Design which examines how the creative process and design methods are helpful in all areas of business.

At its core, design isn’t just about being pretty but about a great customer experience, a concern that any type of business has. How do designers answer those questions? First and foremost, from talking to customers, finding out what their current pain points are, what would encourage them to use a product or to try a different brand. The book gives a great example about new bicycle design at Trek, Raleigh and Giant and how actually designing the bikes was one of the last step, after figuring out why novice bikers are intimidated at bike retailers, building a new brand identity and creating campaigns with local government and business. The people involved moved from designers to design thinkers. See more of Tim’s ideas here:

How’s Your Users’ Experience?

Many amateur Web designers (often business owners themselves) don’t take a user’s experience into account when setting up their site. A good user experience (UX) is crucial in improving a site’s bounce rate (how fast your readers leave your site). The longer a viewer is on the site, the more likely they are to become a customer! There are some small things that professional Web designers know will improve a blog or site’s UX.

Don’t make assumptions! You may assume that your readers know that clicking on an image will take them somewhere, but not everyone does. Add a link for the same path for those readers who are not as savvy as others.

Make your navigation bar clear. Whether it is on the side bar or across the top, your navigation bar should always include HOME, ABOUT US and CONTACT US at the minimum and be visible in the same location on every page. Surprisingly, even some large corporations bury their contact information at the bottom or elsewhere on the site.

Make sure your blog has a link to your main site that is clearly visible. You want readers to get back to your main site easily in case you have purchase options or to contact you.

Be sure your service/product offerings are clearly displayed. Whether that is a tab in your navigation bar that says “Products” or “Shop” or “Services”, be sure it is there and consistently displayed in every page.

Don’t neglect testimonials! One of the best things you can do is show legitimate testimonials on your page and if you can get a customer or client to record a video of their testimonial, make sure this is prominent on your site.

Make sure your site is easy to read. For digital text, use a sans serif type font (Arial and Helvetica are common choices), not a serif font like Times New Roman (serifs are those little legs that letters sit on). Be sure that there is enough contrast between font color and background color.

Leave enough white space. Eyes need a place to rest. If a site is crammed full of images and text, readers will get fatigued quickly and move on. Content in articles and text needs to be broken up with paragraph breaks, bullet points, etc.

Ratio7.com does Web site reviews and will offer input on how you can improve your user experience or can do a site redesign for you, improving your UX and search engine optimization. Give us a call and let us know how we can help.

What Makes a Great Brand?

Fast Company has a brilliant article reminding business that, despite new media, internet, social networking, a company’s brand remains important to your businesses results. Here’s a summary for those of you tempted to ignore or downplay the importance of this business basic

Your brand needs to be believable and your team needs to buy into what it stands for to promote it accurately and with enthusiasm.  Though a well thought out logo is important, this is not your brand! Your brand is about your culture and what your products/services stand for or what you want them to mean for consumers.

Your brand should be relevant. The only way to maintain relevance is with ongoing and in-depth customer engagement.

Things change fast in the marketplace. Thus, your brand better be adaptable. As the market and consumer needs change, you need to review your brand strategy to make sure it still fits with the image you hope to convey.

You need to be able to gauge your brand’s return on investment (ROI). In other words, it’s effectiveness needs to be based on solid numbers like market share and revenue.

One of the most challenging requirements of an effective brand is that it should be unique (differentiated). Your brand should be about consumer solutions, not features. Design and creativity are key components of effective branding that stands out from a saturated market. Your graphics firm should understand this and help you build or change your brand into something that captures attention and conveys what you want your company to stand for!

Colour and Graphic Design

Color is an extremely important part of graphic design. Most people do not realize that color conveys emotion and how formal the message of your design pieces are. Changing a color scheme on a layout can completely change the look and feel of what you are trying to say to your customers or clients. As you are working with a designer on your print and Web products, keep these thoughts in mind.

Colours look different online than they do in print. There are two different colour models-RGB for print and CMYK for electronic.A designer can walk you through these differences and help you pick choices that are the most similar in electronic or print versions.

White space is the unused, blank areas on your graphic piece and can be as important as areas filled with text and images. A person’s eyes need a place to rest and white space can add impact to what you are saying in the areas that are filled.

Opacity is how “see through” a colour is. Sheer washes of colour can be used in backgrounds and will vary in opacity. Adding dense and opaque text can add depth to your print and Web pieces.

Colour choices say a lot about your company. While navy blue is a formal color, orange is a young, casual color. Sites or companies that are “natural” tend to use earth tones, while a company that is in manufacturing will often use gray tones. If you want to grab attention, nothing works like red which is why it is Ratio7′s site is built around that colour.

Colours should be consistent. You print and electronic graphic pieces should all use the same color scheme to brand you or your company properly. Some experts are suggesting that individuals who are job hunting brand themselves with colour as well!

Work with a seasoned graphic designer who will get to know you and your company thoroughly. Together you should make wise colour choices to ensure that you are conveying the emotion and message that you intend!

Pump Up Your Creativity!

Creativity isn’t important just for artists, musicians, graphic designers and writers. These days everyone in business is tasked with being more innovative. So how do you get those juices flowing when you don’t feel like you are a creative person?

Let’s dispel this myth: Only certain people are creative. Not true! Whether it is writing a business proposal, developing a new product, solving a human resources problem-they are all examples of creativity. To help keep your brain flexible and to generate new ideas, try some of these things:

1. Do things differently. Take a different route to work, try new restaurants, buy a piece of jewelry you wouldn’t normally wear. Anything you do that is outside your normal routine or style stimulates new areas in your brain. Even sleeping on the other side of the bed than you usually do causes your brain to say “hey! what’s this about?” and starts the neurons firing.

2. Read new material. If you usually read the paper and Inc. magazine, head over to the music, art or lifestyle section and grab a new magazine. Wired is a great magazine that blends business, technology, entertainment and is loaded with innovative design. Absorb information from a whole different world than yours.

3. Learn something. Always had a hidden hankering to learn to play the drums or to write a screenplay or bake bread? Take a class or two and get engaged in something you’ve always dreamed of doing.

4. Check out some creativity blogs: Creativity-Online, Creativity-Portal, and Fuel Your Creativity are all great choices with prompts and ideas to help you see things in new and different ways.

5. Finally, don’t take it all so seriously. Lighten up. Watch a comedy. Play with your kids. Get out in the snow or for a walk in the park. Roll on the ground with your dog. Unplug your computer, cell phone and tv for awhile and just listen to some music-or be quiet.

Hallmarks of Great Web Design

Consider a Web site your “home away from home”. It is the landing destination for current or would-be customers and it is imperative that it be graphically appealing with solid content and an easy user experience. What do all these things mean though? What is graphically appealing? How do you define solid content or a great UX (user experience)? Let’s walk you through a few of these terms:

A graphically appealing site supports what your business does without detracting by being too busy or confusing for new or established visitors. Choice of color, images, font and whether to add multimedia or flash animation depend greatly on WHO YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE (or who you want them to be). If your customers are older and conservative, your site should reflect that (no bright colors, a more streamlined layout and perhaps a serif font). Of course, if you want to attract a younger crowd despite your current customer base, you will want to expand that. If you are serving teens, your site is likely to be much more animated and graphics driven. Older customers will read written content, younger customers won’t read much…

Solid content means your site should have words that make it easy to find by search engines (like Yahoo, Bing or Google) and that accurately and succintly describe what you do, who you are and why they should be customers. It should give your readers a variety of ways to find you that they don’t have to dig around for…

Which brings us to the UX: user experience. Take note of some of the Web sites you visit-some, like your bank, because you have to and others because you want to. Notice the things that frustrate you. Is it hard to find a site logon (if you have to register?) or a way to find a phone number for your personal wireless service? Have you come across a site and you aren’t sure what the company does or the site is about? This is bad user experience. You want your visitors to spend time, poking around, getting to know you and the company. Dwell time is important. The longer they stay, the more likely they are to buy or sign on with you.

Whether you are getting a Web site for a brand new company or you are thinking about redesigning your current Web site, keep these things in mind. Ratio7 specializes in media and graphic design. We can do a site redesign or development for you that is graphically appealing with solid content and a great user experience. Call or email us for a consultation.

Photo Courtesy LARuth.

Before You Hire a Logo Designer

Logo design is an art and a science. The process can seem a bit tedious and like it is lacking a structured process. There is no way to do logo design without a great relationship between designer and client. Lots of communication and tweaking are involved until the client feels fully satisfied. There are a few steps to take in advance of hiring your designer and ways to make the process of logo design smoother.

Talk to your team, if you have one. If not, solicit input and ideas from people you trust and who know you and your business. The more ideas you have upfront, the easier it will be for the designer.

Ask yourself some questions. Do you want a casual colorful image or something more conservative and traditional? Where will you conceivably use the logo? Web, print, uniforms, banners, or additional licensed products to sell? Jot them all down.

Do your homework. Get out there and really look at other business logos. Identify the good from the bad and then save the ones that really speak to you and that seem like something that fits with your company’s culture.

Develop a budget. Most logo designs are bid as a single project, but do keep in mind this isn’t a 1 hour task. There will be lots of conversations, research on the designer’s part, and actual drawing and design. Ask yourself what you can realistically afford.

Once you’ve started the process, make yourself available to the designer. Your logo won’t get done if your designer can’t reach you! Realize that you are a key element of the design and make time in your schedule for phone calls and meetings.

A logo should reach out and visually grab potential customers. Great logos stand out in people’s minds: McDonald’s arches, Nike’s swoosh. Talk to Ratio7 about your logo needs. We’ll work with you to develop your distinctive brand!

It’s Time for Corporate Holiday Cards!

So few people send mail anymore. It is a digital era and most of our communication is by phone or email. Actually going to the post box and opening an envelope, without a bill inside, is a rarity. And, thus, it is an easy way to stand out. Holiday season is upon us, so we not create a unique and warm holiday greeting tailored to your company, its culture and vision?

Whether a traditional Christmas card or a more generalized holiday greeting, these lovely print messages still matter. They are a way to communicate your thanks to your customers and colleagues for the work you’ve done together throughout the year. And they make you and your company more memorable.

Ratio7 has affordable options, from very hip to very traditional. Talk with one of our designers about how we can incorporate your logo or image into a greeting card that catches the eye and expresses your warmest wishes to the recipient. But contact us soon because the holidays are fast approaching!

Photo via Creative Commons by Kevin Dooley

What Your Design Team Can Do

Graphic design firms, like Ratio7, probably take for granted that the general public understands what they do and what their service offerings are. So, what can you expect in regards to services when you contact Ratio7?

The core of where you begin is with branding (or re-branding). A graphic design firm, like Ratio7, will meet with you to build a visual concept of your company. This includes core values, culture, your target demographic, what you actually do, where you are located, what the history of your company is and the story of how it began. All of these help a design firm develop your overall brand. From that point, they begin to develop a logo. A logo will be used in a variety of ways and will help identify your company quickly.

Next will be a Web site, from the ground up or a redesign of an existing site. This will involve examining your search engine optimization, your meta tags, your user experience (UX), copywriting and the general design and how it fits with your branding vision. We can create and install flash animation. If you need a blog or templates for Twitter or MySpace, we can do that too!

Then there is print. Your design team will develop a whole print series: business cards, brochures, advertisements, post cards, flyers and whatever else you need (cd or video covers, special events products) . Part of all these branding efforts will be copywriting which should be vibrant, engaging and understandable. Ratio7′s copywriting team can also do translations to make your materials more accessible.

Finally, there is new media. Video production is important these days and a cutting-edge graphics firm like Ratio7 can help you creating exciting and engaging video for your Website or promotional DVD’s. We can also upload these to your site or onto sites like YouTube.

We hope this helps you understand what a top-notch graphic design firm can do for you. Don’t settle for less! Feel free to contact us for a consultation on any of these services-and if you don’t see it listed here or on our site, don’t hesitate to ask!

Why a Blog Matters

Blogging should be a key component of your online marketing plan. Blogging allows you to interact with customers and clients in a more conversational, community-oriented way and offers them additional value over the basic information your Web site probably offers. Blogging doesn’t need to be done daily, but it does need to be done consistently to garner an audience.

Blogging helps with search engine results because, though your topics are in a specific area, they are generally broader than the content on your business site. Thus if someone looks up “graphic design” and “blogging” they are more likely to find Ratio7 because we’ve written this post. Additionally, the outbound links that you incorporate in posts to either your own site or others increase your site traffic which improves your search engine rankings.

Using a blog helps you tell a broader story about your business. You can engage, educate and/or entertain your readers which helps you develop a culture and builds loyalty. The use of graphics, video and audio all help enrich the experience for your readers and customers.

There are a variety of blog sites and software available to business. Most professional companies use WordPress and it’s what we recommend. Ratio7 can design or modify a WordPress theme (template) to match your overall branding efforts and, because WordPress is easy to manage,  you can post, add graphics and links and manage comments with little training. Themes are extremely professional looking with an endless variety of plug-ins (mini-applications) and upgrades.

Ratio7 also has affordable business marketing starter kits which include logo design, letterhead, business cards, a domain name and WordPress set up, plus free hosting and free email. Let us walk you through the process of either adding or updating your blog or starting a branding effort from scratch!

Personal Branding Meets Design

Branding isn’t just for large corporations like Nike and Starbucks though we are all familiar with their logos and culture. Branding is also for individuals, particularly those who work as speakers, consultants, coaches but can also be important for doctors, massage therapists and more. What is Personal Branding? Tom Peters wrote a brilliant article which coined the term back in 1997 and is still the official guru on the topic. However, the young Dan Schawbel has run with the concept! Every thing you do, every thing you say (especially online and in print) is part of your brand.

How does graphic design fit in with personal branding? You need a compelling set of graphics for your various marketing materials: Website/blog (including WordPress theme as appropriate), business cards, Twitter background, postcards, flyers, e-book covers, print book covers and more. All of this helps build and support your personal brand. Generally, but not always, personal brands don’t have a logo but a group of interesting and unique photographs is a must.

Unlike corporate brands, the brand called “YOU” is more able to express its individual attributes. Are you a casual t-shirts and jeans kind of consultant? Or do you speak to and consult with more traditional business like insurance or banking? Your branding philosophy should be more formal then.

Some individuals building strong personal brands are Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah, and (love him or hate him) Donald Trump. Visually Vaynerchuk does a great job of creating a quasi-logo using his name. Trump uses his name on EVERYTHING. Even though you are not yet this famous there are things you can do to visually build your brand:

Use your signature (if it is a cool one) as your logo. Use it on business cards, as your blog/site header and more.

Take advantage of an odd name or see if there are any play on words you can use.

Make sure you have an email signature telling people what you do.

Get the best quality print and online materials you can afford. Michael Port recommends this in Booked Solid on building your client base (and his personal brand is pretty strong also). Your materials represent YOU and it is important to get the best you possibly can.

Ratio7 can work with you on developing the visuals for your personal brand. From custom WordPress and Twitter themes to good old fashioned business cards, we have a creative and “in the know” design team who can help you stand out!

Boost Your Creativity!

Creativity is not just for graphic and Web designers, writers and artists. On the business landscape, creativity is getting a lot of press. Innovation, ideas, thinking “outside the box” are all extensively taught and recruited for in business. Problem-solving is a creative process. There are some great resources online that will teach you how to be more creative and inspire you at the same time.

Brainzooming. This blog is all about teaching you techniques and giving you tools to amp up your creativity. This post, in one line, gives you one of the best pieces of advice for getting noticed by customers or your employer.

Quixoting. This blog, billed as a “quest for new ideas” has an awesome selection of posts on innovation and creativity, including in the use of social media.

IDEO. IDEO is the leading branding and design firm in the world. Their site is packed with both visual and mental stimulation from leaders in cutting-edge design. Harvard Business Review has a brilliant article on “design thinking” that features IDEO designers.

Creativity Portal. Wow! This site is jam packed and full of ideas for all disciplines: writers, musicians, artists. However, even if you are a CFO, taking a break to doodle can free up your mind to relieve stress and increase productivity.

One of the best overall business and personal creativity books is How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genuis Every Day. It has an accompanying workbook and loads of exercises and is useful for anyone in business or the arts. Stretching new muscles in your brain through creativity leads to business breakthroughs.

Ratio7 is a team of talented designers and writers, all available to represent your business in the most creative and eye-catching way possible! Call or email for a consultation.

Time for an SEO Site Review?

Do a quick search for SEO and you will drown in all of the articles and news about search engine optimization on the Web. Of course, you used a search engine to do your search!  Websites should be configured to make it easy for search engines like Yahoo and Google to find your company. Many are not! Websites that are even a year old can benefit from having a review of their code and content. Ratio7 specializes in SEO site audits by:

• reviewing meta tags
• reviewing keywords
• link building
• reviewing your URL structure
• auditing your overall design and user experience
• checking for HTML code compliance

What will this do for YOU and your business?

• increase your page rankings on Google, Yahoo and other search engines
• drive traffic to your Web site
• educate readers about what you do
• help you build community

Statistics show that most searchers do not make it past the first page and the 10th entry in search results. Moving your site up that ranking ladder can be crucial to drawing new customers. Ratio7 can also help you set up a blog and develop a custom WordPress theme which will also increase your page ranking. Have a look at some of our case studies and then give us a call!

Add Special Zing to Twitter

You are running around social networking land like mad, trying to make an impression for you and/or your business. You are trying to build your brand-either corporate or business. You are on LinkedIn, Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter (perhaps more). LinkedIn and Facebook offer nothing in terms of customization, but Twitter…ah….

While Twitter provides easy to use background template designs, they are used by the vast majority of Twitter members and don’t allow for adding graphics or text. Your Twitter background is an opportunity for more people to learn about you and see a link to your website or blog.

However, Twitter does allow for you to upload a background as a single page. A graphic designer can create a custom background and embed your logo, your image, a bio and links which acts like an advertisement for your business or services! Be forewarned. Links are simply text, they are not hyperlinks so people cannot click on them. This is Twitter’s fault-not your designers!

Ratio7 offers full service graphic design, including Twitter backgrounds as well as WordPress blog and site themes, print, logo and Web design to make your business more visible! Call or email us for a free consultation now.

Today’s Business Card

Despite advances in technology, Web design and capabilities, a business card still makes an important statement and is a necessary tool for networking. If you are still using one of the 1500 business cards you bought 5 years ago, it might be time to have a designer review both your design and the content on the card. With the advent and popularity of social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as well as blogs, you need to provide a variety of ways for people to contact you. Besides, business cards continue to change shape, size and material so it might be time to break out and have some fun with that tiny piece of cardstock that represents you after you’ve walked away from an in-person meeting.

What changes can you make?

Ratio7 finds that clients are increasingly choosing a portrait set up vs. landscape. See below for sample.

Consider adding all your social media contact info, a brief overview of your business or service offerings, or just a striking logo  on the back side in a contrasting color. See below for sample.

Try selecting a unique material to make your card stand out. Cards come in wood, metal, vellum, plastic, aluminum, cardboard and more! To generate ideas, check out the Flickr business card group here.
Small changes like rounded corners, or even one rounded corner, make your card stand out from the pack. Raised lettering, a punch out on the card, or a magnet feature are all options.

Finally, do add all of your social meda contacts on your card. This can increase your following and contacts and gives your network the ability to find you and what you do in a variety of locations.

Ratio7 is a full-service media and graphics firm and can create a striking, yet affordable new look for your business card. Just contact us for a free consultation!