Category Archives: Branding

3 Reasons You Should Host Your Own Blog

Everyone and their mom is blogging these days – what sets you apart from the rest of the pack? This is not an easy question to answer, and the chances are that you will have to put a little more effort in order to get that edge. One of the things that you ought to do is to seek out a good data center service provider to host your own blog instead of relying on the hosting provided by a free blogging platform.

Take a look at these three compelling reasons why you ought to do so.

Control Appearance/Design

When you host your own blog, you have the advantage of gaining more control over its appearance and the design. Naturally, you want your blog to be as professional as it can be, and you want to have your own mark stand out. With a free blog network, the chances are that you will face restrictions in this regard.

Generate more revenue

Free blog networks come with a lot of stipulations. While you will be able to run a “full” blog on them, you might not be able to have as much access as you can from potential revenue sources. Hosting your own blog will open up so many more opportunities.

Promote your brand

This is linked directly to the first advantage. If you have your own domain and your own host, you will be able to establish your brand more fully. Compare this to having a generic URL and template/design attached to a free blog platform.

If you are serious about gaining that blogging edge, you really ought to get your own blog host. With all the choices available, it will not really cost you that much. More so, the benefits that you gain will outweigh the cost.

Photo via andyp

Originally posted on October 26, 2010 @ 2:33 am

LogoMyWay.com – Review

We live in a very visual world. If you want to stand out from the crowd then what you need to do is to make an indelible mark visually. It’s the reason why businesses put a lot of effort in developing a great logo for their company.

A company logo is the face of the enterprise. It is one of the most important tools in making a company immediately recognizable. Any marketing professional will tell you that recognizability is a major part of a company’s success. The more unique and perfectly suited the design is to the company’s image, the better the results.

Unfortunately, getting that great, innovative design is also the biggest problem of any company looking to develop their corporate identity. The art of creating a logo or a corporate design is something not everyone can do. Laymen like us can plot the general direction but not the nitty-gritty of the implementation. One can go to design companies to outsource the project. The upside here is that you get professionals to do it for you, but this can be an expensive proposition and you are limited to just a few mockups to choose from.

But a new online enterprise called logomyway.com has developed an innovative way of addressing the needs of companies looking for unique logos and corporate identity designs.

The idea behind logomyway.com is quite simple. By signing up with the service you can hold contests for designing the logo or design that you need. Logomyway has a community of hundreds of designers all over the world who participate in these contests. You will put up the cash prize for the contest and logomyway will get ten percent of the amount for administrative and paypal fees. The logo contest prize starts at a minimum of $200 and up to a $1000.

This system has a number of significant advantages over hiring a design company. The biggest advantage is the sheer number of mockups that you will get. You’d be lucky to get more than five mockups from a design company. But with the Logomyway system, you are guaranteed to get a minimum of 20 mockups submitted within seven days or you get a refund. It is not uncommon to get 70 mockups and up to 400 mockups for a contest! The sheer number alone will surely give you a wealth of designs to choose from.

Another advantage is that you will usually get submissions within a few hours – and not the weeks that design companies usually require. This is the kind of immediate feedback that you will surely appreciate.

Te quality of the designs that are submitted are also of the highest quality and exceptional artistry. The logomyway designer community comprise of seasoned graphic designers from different countries. They offer their experience in the field as well as their unique cultural perspective to bring you truly innovative designs.

All of the submissions are requied to be in industry standard Vector Logo files that makes it immensely scalable for any type of application.

More than this though is that you get full ownership of the logo design. The copyright to the artwork is given to you.

Logomyway.com offers a truly unique way of addressing your logo and artwork needs by offering both high quality submissions from experienced designers at really affordable costs.

Originally posted on June 12, 2009 @ 1:53 am

Branding David: Consulting and Speaking

Over the last few months, I have been fortunate enough to speak at two different events, and in doing so, I only increased my interest in speaking, training, consulting and teaching and so I have decided to build out a new blog called Branding David.

This blog won’t change, and will continue to talk about blogging, and building out blogs, advertising and podcasting, but on Branding David, I will talk about owning a small business, working for others, consulting, speaking at conferences and events, as well as other things that I have been interested in writing about, and never had a platform to do so.

If you enjoy this blog, I hope you will check out Branding David and let me know what you think of it.

Some posts that I have already written that people seem to enjoy include:

Originally posted on October 13, 2008 @ 2:59 pm

Follow Up on The Design Critique

For those of you that keep a keen eye on this blog, you might have noticed a post about critiquing this blog over on Blogging Tips.

There were some amazing comments, including an analysis by Kevin Muldoon, Blogging Tips owner, and I feel really humbled by those that chose to participate.

Kevin drew a little flack from coming up with a set of criteria for entry, but I think that he handled it well, and I look forward to seeing which other blogs get put under the magnifying glass.

The biggest tip for this blog was to work on scaling back advertising, which I have already started, and work on moving items around to give the site a better flow. Many people seemed to enjoy the content, as well as the branding, but overall it seemed like there were many things people thought could be done better.

It is very humbling to have people put their opinion out there, and while I am still digesting some of what they said, I am definitely thinking about hunting down a great designer to take my current branding and help me take the design of this site to the next level. Don’t get me wrong, DesignDisease is absolutely amazing, and I will probably contact them first, but I think this site is ready for another slight design shift.

Originally posted on September 2, 2008 @ 9:45 pm

Lesson Learned: Keep One Consistent Home

One of the biggest lessons that I learned over the past month is that I should really keep one consistent home on the web, and having not done so over the last three years has been to my career and personal branding efforts detriment.

I have moved from site to site, from place to place, and from company to company, and while many people know me rather intimately, in the more general sense, I am relatively unknown.

Attending Blog World Expo, I assumed a few people would know me outside of my normal social circles but that really wasn’t the case. Some people knew the sites I had written on, but most people didn’t know me by name.

If you want to do well online, it is smart to create one place where people can always find you, even if you are working as a blogger for other companies or blog networks. Don’t do as I’ve done and move from place to place or it can become difficult to remember who you are.

Hopefully, over time, I will be able to rectify this error on my part through continued brand building in a wider variety of mediums as those that were doing video podcasts were the most recognized, second came those that did a variety of audio podcasts, and third came us primarily text-only bloggers. So if you want to be recognized, a second tip would be to get your face and voice out on the web as much as possible.

Originally posted on September 28, 2008 @ 11:18 pm