Branding is one of the most important aspects of creating a successful product. Brand identity often revolves around simple visual cues. There are several types of visual cues that can be used for branding.
One simple way to brand is color. When you UPS did a major campaign a while back “what can brown do for you?”
Another is style. Site Sketch 101 might be about how to blog, but it is the hand sketched style and appearance that give it such a distinct branded look. Nick is an awesome example of how to brand.… Click to continue...
Today is my first day ranked as an Alexa top 100,000 site. When I started blogging, I didn’t really know much about what all the rankings meant, but I knew that I wanted to get my Alexa Rank in the top 100,000 because that was their cutoff for caring about your site.
I have read several articles about how Alexa ranking was useless, but never took it to heart. While I don’t hold Alexa in the same high esteem as I did when I first started, I still believe Alexa ranking provides great information about the type of traffic you have… Click to continue...
Over the last couple of months, Twitter has been taking major steps to become more user friendly. The first major step was adding Twitter Lists. They are an extremely helpful way to organize people you want to follow. This is especially useful if you’re following thousands of people.
Twitter is now doing Beta testing for the built in ReTweet button. Even though I use Hoot Suite (which has a build in ReTweet function) for 90% of my Tweeting needs, occasionally, I do some tweeting from Twitter as well.
The Retweet button appears right next to the reply button on the bottom right of each tweet. When You click it, a message asks if you want… Click to continue...
Links have always been one of the most critical aspects of the internet. Being able to link multiple related pages together provides a tremendous value to readers.
Back in the pre-Web 2.0 days, a lot of links were written with “click here” as the anchor text (and a lot of people still link like this). While that makes writing the link easy for the author, it is boring and not descriptive. Furthermore, search engines use the text the link is anchored to in order to determine what value the link has. I’m shocked at the number of people I see not using optimized anchored links. Appropriately anchored text is an awesome SEO tool.
Use Anchored Links To Improve Your… Click to continue...
Tweeter has been the center of a ton of attention the last year. It’s explosive growth and strength as a real time organic search engine, instant breaking news resource, and marketing tool provide people using it an amazing advantage over those who don’t.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about 5 Twitter Newbie Mistakes To Avoid which was a great hit and some basic information about Twitter Lists. The success of those articles has made me do a lot of thinking about how to get the most out of Twitter.
Five Reasons To Use Twitter
If you’re like me, you use Twitter for 5 reasons: To find… Click to continue...
A lot has been going on this week here in Props Blog land. Today is my first anniversary with my beautiful wife Leah! We also signed disclosure papers on a house and expect to finish closing by the end of the month. Last but not least, we’re expecting in June! (Talk about being busy)
You’ll also notice a lot has changed here at Props blog in the last month. I’ve been completely changing up the theme to make it more attractive and easier to navigate (hopefully it has helped).
I have noticed a steady increase in both traffic and RSS subscribers. I finally manned up and signed… Click to continue...
The other day, I was at Houlihan’s eating dinner with my wife and my dad. We stayed there for several hours chatting, and I started think about how a restaurant is a lot like a blog.
First Impressions Can Make Or Break You
When we walked through the door to look at the menu and eventually eat, it was like someone visiting your blog. You’ve got the lead, but if you want them to come back, you need to make it worth their time. If the restaurant looks dirty or trashy, the guest will turn around and walk right out. The same holds true of blogs and their appearance. People do just books by their cover.
Fast Service Won’t… Click to continue...
It is rant time here at Props Blog. A lot of people think that being successful and “trying” just means showing up. Part of being successful is just showing up, but that’s only a tiny percent of it. If you don’t show up to play, why bother?
Sending A Lousy E-mail Is Not Trying
After reading the responses to John Chow’s e-mail of the week, I can’t believe how lazy and scandalous people are. If you think for 1 second that Dan actually tried to be successful, you are out of your damn mind. Stop trying to be so nice and give people sympathy (especially when they don’t deserve it).
As I mentioned… Click to continue...
Earlier this week I signed up to be a Click Booth Affiliate. Since affiliate marketing is all the rage right now, I thought I would have a look and see what everyone is talking about.
I previously signed up for Click Bank and found the site to be annoying to navigate. A few of the offers seemed to be solid products that I would have liked to test and possibly promote, but I couldn’t easily find the resources I was looking for.
Having had such a turn-off experience with Click Bank, I was very skeptical of Click Booth. Boy was I in for a shock.
Click Booth Educates Their… Click to continue...
Webpage design is critical to effectively capturing your reader’s attention and keeping them on your page. If a reader arrive and nothing catches their eye, they are likely to bounce right away. When there is too much going on, a reader might not know where to start, get frustrated, and leave too. Finally, if the reader’s attention is drawn to unimportant parts of your page, they won’t end up reading the information you think is important.
Use Feng Shui for Graphic User Interface Eye Tracking
One of the best ways to increase the impact your site has on a new visitor is to optimize the design of your site… Click to continue...
