My site ranks fairly well, and my expenditure on SEO is negligible. How do I do it? Well, I make sure I am listed in all the major search engines to begin with. Seems like a silly starting point, but actually being in the search engine database is the first step to being found. Adding relevant keywords to describe your site in the page coding and having a simple yet effective description for your site will help no end. It might not push up your ranking result but the traffic to your site will be much more targeted to the intended audience of your site.

Add your site to niche search engines, nowadays you can find sites that house links to all sorts of topics. Every time I find a graphic designer search engine, I make sure I add in my site. (but not the paid inclusion ones as I would be broke if I paid for every site I found).

Making sure your online social profiles have a link back to your site can help, but the best tip is always to check where your direct competitors are linked from. There are many ways to check these, but the easiest two are to simply search for their website address and see which sites are linked to them. The other way is to use yahoo site explorer and use the results you find from these as a starting point to source links to your site. Just having the sites linking to your competitors also linking to you will improve your chances to get closer to them or even surpass them.

You will never be as good at this as someone who does it professionally, but this will get you started and will teach you a bit of what’s involved in the process. This means you can spot some more of the dodgy operators and not end up wasting your investment in SEO with someone who might just spam the online forums with your link to push up your ranking for a short period.

The other tip is to make sure your website has great content and doesn’t rely on a gimmicky flash animation to make your site look fancy. Better content will improve your site visitor conversions to sales and will help drive referral traffic to you and not your competitor. Any investment in a good copywriter for your site will reap you much greater rewards in sales conversions long term than you would see otherwise.

The only other tip is to start now. Not next week, next quarter or next financial year. Do it now, the sooner the better. During economic tough times you should be investing more in your online presence as this is something that will help push you out to new customers or reassure your current clients that you are investing in one of your best sales tools.

Another villian of note would have to be the liche king in World of Warcraft. Without having a focus for your game it seems just too disconnected. Consider the Arkham Asylum game, who would Batman fight against without the Joker there? The janitors? No, the game would be terrible without the legendary Joker making his presence felt in the game.

Do you have a favourite villian? Or maybe there is a bad guy in a game that just annoys you more than any other!

Travelling to and from work would be certainly more productive, as long as I was designing new tshirts and not just watching happy tree friends episodes on it.

So, what options do they have? Well, if the designer supplies them print ready PDFs for all the business cards and letterheads, they can choose to use a short run printer, or to save hassle use one of the online printing services. Printing via one of these is quite simply a case of setting up your user account and loading the artwork. You get a PDF proof emailed back, and then once you approve it, it gets printed and shipped to you. The bonus being you can get short runs printed, and if you take off in business instead of getting 50 cards printed, you can go back and get 500 or 1,000.

I have found this helps restrict initial costs for the business and its something they can do to test market reactions to new advertising before rolling out a huge run of a flyer. An early cost saving can sometimes mean the life or death of a business, especially when you are trying to pay for advertising, design AND the printing all at once, invariably before any real income for the business is being generated!

mp3 to m4r

I know I have quite a few to convert and put up for sharing!

This is the totally NON PC ringtone from the Hahn Super Dry ad.

Okay, I admit it, I wanted this as soon as I heard it, and found it very quickly. But now with the new iphone in hand, I wanted it as a ringtone, and I had to convert it to an .m4r so here it is in zip format for you to download and add to your iphones as well!

Hahn Super Dry Ringtone

You haven’t heard of spinal tap? For shame!

This is THE mockumentary for rock. So many quotes have come from this movie, but the most quoted is possibly… ‘it goes to eleven’

It is a good movie for those of you who know the industry, or are just looking for some comedy with some rock mixed in.

Give it a watch, you won’t be disappointed. But be warned, they are not PC nor are they to be taken seriously.

Best part is, you can now build category folder images to brand your store even further.

I may not have mentioned in my previoous post about the interface for building designs on zazzle, as most of them allow you to upload the final design to the site, zazzle has a little interface which allows to tweak the image locations, add text in a variety of fonts, and best of all, it tells you if your image is not high enough resolution for the size you scale it to. Why is this so good? It means I can add some text to a tshirt when I think of it, rather than have to wait to get to my computer, put it in photoshop, and then upload the image of the text. Plus, you can add text to existing designs on the site, to personalize them for yourself. Which is something I have done on more than one occasion!

Next step is to look at using the coding to make the store from zazzle sit on my website without ever having to leave it for impulse purchases!

Check out some of the products below.