Designers and Artists are always the target of clients, or potential clients, asking "Can you do this for free? " I'm sure doing this project will get you "Exposed". Even I use the word "Exposure" when talking to designers about Styleapple. But how do you know when to say "yes" and when to say "NO... I would like to get paid for this project?"

Well, the truth is, this question cannot be answered by a simple yes or no, but rather based on a few obvious things like a designer's experience, talent, demographics, popularity and the hours it would take to do a project.

However, I don't believe an artist should automatically say no to any offer of exposure just as a matter of principle. If you're going to say no, do it as a matter of a prudent business decision. I believe that we should always get paid for our work. But payment is not always monetary. Payment can be in the form of a partnership collaboration, exchange of services and even exposure.

I know most designers/artists might object to what I'm saying but I think we have to be mindful of what exposure can do. I read a "Times" article a while back where a number of artists turned down an opportunity to display their work on Google Chrome simply because they weren't getting paid. I'm sorry, but if Google wants to make my work available to possibly millions of potential customers and the only stipulation is that I do it for free... all I can say is where do I sign?

Let's say Google pays me $1000.00 Dollars one time for some artwork. That money may last a week or two at most, depending on how close I am to the weekend or the end of the month. As opposed to getting my work seen by millions of potential customers, where the income potential is much greater. To me it's a no brainer.

Don't get me wrong, as a self proclaimed negotiator(especially after that real estate seminar) I would do my best to get both. But if it's an either or situation, I'm choosing exposure. Like Kenny Rogers said in that song, the gambler "You've got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them".  Basically saying you've got to know when a good thing is staring you in the face.

Most freelance designers and artists manage all aspects of their business. That being said, you have to be a great artist but a better business person. If you have to say no to exposure do it to someone who will expose your work to the 3 people that visit their website per month, not to Google who can expose your work to millions.  Like Seth Godin says, it's not the invention that makes you famous, it's the ability to spread it; paraphrasing of course.

How are you currently spreading your creativity, your artwork, your design perspective? So as much as we hate the word exposure (without pay) ... I think we should carve out our own version of the word so that it's not so ugly, but rather an awesome opportunity to grow our design business.

Sponsor  iPage - Small business web hosting $3.50/mo!!

UPDATE 3/2/2009:

 Found an interesting article on Advertising Age from a tweet by Dan Schawbel @danschawbel detailing a Personal Brand/Corporate Brand conflict with Ford Motors.   Interesting read. 

You can read part 1  of this series here:  Is Your Company’s Logo Design F*#$%ing Up Your Brand Image?

 Branding by definition implies a level of trust in your product or service, something that your clients and customers can depend on.  Apple for their innovation and service, Google for their quick and relevant searches.  A part of building a true brand aside from having a great product or service is the consistency of the brand’s image and actual brand message across multiple media platforms. 

But who is responsible for  your company’s brand message?

A few years ago a company’s  advertising and PR departments  were the gate keepers of their information and decided what and how the information was disseminated.  Now with the introduction of Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Styleapple,  your company’s blogs, etc,  you find that people are no longer interested  in what the company has to say directly, rather they seem to be gravitating to information being shared through employees and company executives themselves. 

I would personally rather follow Steve Jobs updates rather than  Apple, Inc. updates on Twitter (if I had to choose)  Given the gloomy recollection of corporate information and how difficult it was to understand exactly what their press releases were about, I think that  bad taste in our months  still lingers…  even if it’s now disguised as a Twitter bird dressed up in Facebook clothing.  Taking a phase from our most recent American political election  “You can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig” 

Frankly, Social Networking has drastically changed the way companies will build their brand images going forward, where your most valuable assets  become even more valuable  (Employees  and corporate execs now takes center stage in how well a company’s brand is communicated to the masses)  The important thing is to make sure the message is consistent and clear when your company’s brand becomes a sum of its parts or rather, a sum of your employees personal brands. Take a look at  How to Lay The Brand Foundation For A Consulting Business  Blogger, Dan Schawbel  for a bit more insight of how to start a cohesive branding strategy when your business has to manage your employee’s personal brand.

How do you manage your company’s brand when your employees are actively involved in Social Media Networking?

Are You Looking To Hire A Designer? 

Sponsor  iPage - Small business web hosting $3.50/mo!!

Why is everyone so Twitter happy?  I’ll tell you why, because tweeting  is a great way to tell your boss off without him realizing you’re talking about him.   Okay maybe not quite that, but here’s the real reason:

Twitter as you know by now is either mainstream or is heading there fairly quickly.  Everyone is following someone who’s following someone else. 

Twitter users (potential customers) are happy because they’ve found a simple social media platform where they can connect with their peers to meet, update and discuss just about anything.

Marketers are happy because they’ve found another effective way to reach their customers… now that email marketing is in rehab.   The only question I have is this:   Are you reaching the right people?  And, are you saying the right things to them if you are indeed reaching the right people?

Here is something you may or may not know,  when a Twitter user (potential client or customer)  is looking for someone to follow, one of the tools used (out of many, you’ll find a  great list of twitter tools here) to finding people to follow is the Twitter search engine previously called Summize.  Summize lists the most recent mention of the keyword being searched and the Twitter user who used that keyword.  So If you’re are a graphic design company looking for new clients, ‘graphic design quotes’ might be a more reasonable keyword to have in your twitter lexicon as oppose to say… “fly fishing”.  I’m not saying to go keyword crazy,  what I am saying is to be cognizant of what you say and have a sensible balance when you’re getting ready to make your statement to the world with only140 characters or less to do it in.

Stylepple.com Twitter Grader Report

Another nice tool to use is the Hubspot Twitter Grader tool. This Twitter tool gives you a report of how effective a Twitter user you are.   It gives you  a twitter grade based on a variety of factors including your follower : following ratio and your followers influence.   It also generates a tag cloud of your tweets, giving you an idea of  the words and phrases that is most prominent in your tweet history.  

A nice added bonus to this tool is its search option which provides a list of the most influential Twitter users for a given keyword… really handy when looking for thought leaders to follow in your industry.

Twitter along with  the other social media networking sites can be an effective way to reach your clients and customers simply by following a few simple rules of engagement.  With a little bit of time and patience you too can become  ‘Twitter’ happy

Sponsor  iPage - Small business web hosting $3.50/mo!!

You know you're good when you can create a viral YouTube video about inbound marketing while using inbound marketing techniques to effectively promote your inbound marketing business. Simply Genius, Kudos to the guys at Hubspot. 

Sponsor  iPage - Small business web hosting $3.50/mo!!

Since this is the final month of elections for the Presidency of the United States - Election Day November 4, 2008.  I've decided to dedicate the next four weeks on the elections and show how social networking and branding can be effectively utilized.  That being said, I wanted to share with you what I believe is the most effective branding strategy in recent American history.

After watching the vice presidential debates last week It struck me that I'm in the middle of a very historical event.  I've never been so engaged in American politics before.  Seriously, this has been such  an experience to be right in the middle of what will go down in history as one of the most notable periods in America - the probable election of the first African American President in American history.

What's even more interesting is how clearly branding played a major role.  Two years ago Senator Barack Obama was a name that no one knew or cared about.  Two years later Senator Barack Obama is positioned to becoming the first African American president of the United States.   Knowing the colorful history of Blacks in America you could easily see why this event is simply extraordinary.   With that said.  I'd like to give credit  to Senator Barack Obama and his campaign for an exceptional campaign thus far by effectively creating a brand in 2 years what simply would  take other companies or organizations decades to accomplish.  

The Obama campaign proved that by effectively utilizing the tools of social media one can take down arguably "the most powerful Democratic family in a generation - one that understood the power of money in politics and commanded a network of wealthy donors that has financed the Democratic Party for years" - the Clintons.   Of course it goes without say that many factors played a role in the success of  this campaign thus far, some of which can be seen simply by a visit to the Barack Obama's website - http://www.barackobama.com/.  This website is a blueprint for anyone looking for a reference of an absolutely flawless machine of effective internet marketing which by the way has helped propelled this campaign to raising nearly half  a billion dollars in donations - A political campaign record.  So how did they do it?  Well,  I will attempt to dissect certain marketing elements that I believe assisted in the extreme success of this campaign and hope  that I can shed some light on areas where you can improve your  marketing efforts in your design businesses.

 For the next few weeks I will be talking about:

• The role social networking played in the success of the Barack Obama Presidential Campaign
• Branding and Logo Design - The techniques and strategies used to effectively brand Senator Barack Obama as the "CHANGE" candidate.
• SEO and inbound marketing efforts that help create an influx of web traffic to the Barack Obama website.
• Website esthetics, ease of use and how the Barack Obama website manages the customer's buying cycle and website conversion
• The advertising and marketing tools that contributed to effectively reaching even more supporters to help build the campaign base.
• Final results of the 2008 American Election 2008.

To make it more interesting I've decide to do a comparison of the two candidates running for president:  Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain and see if we can deduce who is utilizing their  marketing  efforts most effectively.   So stay tuned - the next post will be on The Role Social Networking Played in the Success of the Barack Obama's  Presidential Campaign.

IF YOU LIKE THIS ARTICLE YOU CAN SUBSCRIBE TO MY RSS FEED

Sponsor  iPage - Small business web hosting $3.50/mo!!

Lately, I've been monitoring the traffic to my website very closely.  Depending on the day or what article I post, which ones are picked up or published essentially  dictates what referrals sites show up on my beautiful pie chart :) 

Recently I've noticed an upward trend  of visitors  coming from the Google image search.   Google search accounts for roughly 40% of my daily traffic,  about 20%  of that comes from Google image searches.   This doesn't mean  you  should immediately  go and upload as many images as possible to your website or blog (let's face it, an image search is just that, more than likely your conversion rate on an image search is not worth discussing unless you're iStockphoto, Getty images or the likes)  but why not take the opportunity to maximize the effectiveness of something you're doing anyway.  For example when you're uploading an image to your blog or website,  make sure the image is relevant to the content and the name of the image adds value . For example  if you're writing  a blog about logo design, calling your image, image 1 doesn't help, instead  logo design 1 or company logo design  might be a more effective name. Placing keyword rich titles and relevant alt tags are all very important to identifying your images.  

So the next time you're uploading an image to your blog or website try not to blow off the minor details to quickly see the preview of your gorgeous layout :)  Instead take some time to implement the image details that will give your website the edge in Google ‘s image search results. 

Web Design Library wrote a great article on the "9 ways to increase website traffic  using Google image search" The article goes into detail on implementing alt tags anchor texts and even how to set up the enhanced image search feature in Google Webmaster tools.  It's a worthwhile read. Now,  Is content still king, of course it is, but why not supplement your King with a Queen - your well named , title, tagged  and enhanced image Queen.

IF YOU LIKE THIS ARTICLE YOU CAN SUBSCRIBE TO MY RSS FEED

Sponsor  iPage - Small business web hosting $3.50/mo!!

I would like to make a quick point of reference to one of my past sales experience.  I remember back in the day when I was a sales executive  at New York Health and Racquet Club , a New York City based health club.  Our monthly sales quota was to sell about 60 gym memberships per month at a premium price of $2100/yr.   Imagine having to talk to someone you just met and tell them to write a check for $2100 after 10 minutes.  Very daunting task to say the least, but still obviously doable - we met our quota quite often.  But  there is something not being said here. 

You see we had two types of clients coming into our club:  The first was the client who just walk off the street and into the club and the other was a client who knew of our service, quality and reputation (And this was mainly due to the pre-sales efforts incorporated in our sales cycle)    So I'm sure you can guest which client or customers became members more often... The ones with the background of our company of course.  No surprises there.  So if that is indeed the case offline.  Why are we not taking the same initiatives online?  Especially now that more and more of our business income is coming from our website and online efforts.  There are many things  that can assist in the pre-sales process,  including the obvious ones, email campaigns, newsletters  and company design blogs; but what about your website itself? 

Don't get me wrong,  I'm a big fan of blogging to share just this kind of information to your clients; as a matter of fact  Jacob Cass, a well respected graphic designer wrote an article on why logo design does not cost $5.00 in which he outlines his thought process when designing and also justifies his price even before the client hires him. BUT....  How many clients are going to be able to read that article before hiring:  How about those who simply come to your website and is looking for  some direct information regarding your products and services and is not a regular reader or a subscriber to your design blog.  This is why I recommend having a website that truly engages and provide a sense of  understanding and guidance keeping front and center the thought process your customers.

A great example of this is Studio Grafik, A Logo Design and Branding company with a website  that is very simple but has a very effective presentation of their products and service.   They give a quick summary of the client job request,  some thoughts on how they approached the design (1) , showed the completed logo and presented their branding efforts in different mediums, i.e.  Print (2) and website layout (3) and breaks down the logo to its bare mininum to expand on their thought process (4)  This kind of detailed outline of projects engages  and provide a sense of security to the client that this company know their business, even before any phone call or email has been sent.  This is a great pre-sales technique.   I've layout  the flow of Studio Grafik presentation of  one of their clients,  Sublime//ip  for your reference.

What are some of the techniques you've used in your design business for engaging your clients/customers on your website?

IF YOU LIKE THIS ARTICLE YOU CAN SUBSCRIBE TO MY RSS FEED

Sponsor  iPage - Small business web hosting $3.50/mo!!

I'm sure it's no surprise to you that the phrase "Free Download"  is more popular that the phase "Buy Now" in the eyes of your site visitors.  As a matter of fact just out of curiosity I looked up the  search volumes for each phase and found  that customers are searching for  "Buy Now " roughly 860 times per month whereas  "Free Download"  claims roughly 89,000 visitors per month.  No surprise there but as a designer and businessman, the question becomes how can you get a piece of the "Free Download"  search volume pie without losing your shirt giving away all your products and services?

Designers and design companies  alike should  be using  the free download  strategy as an effecitve internet marketing tool to engage new customers.  Giving away  freebies like web templates, graphic images, fonts, tutorials, and Photoshop brushes are all great ways of engaging your site visitors.  Great free stuff gives your customers a chance to get familiar with your company's brand and services which will put you on their short list for future purchases.  Here is a list of 5 great benefits for implementing  the "free download"  marketing technique to increase your bottom line:

1. Free downloads can assist in an increase in your opt-in email list. This can lead to building customer relationships though email newsletters and promotional offers. Being consistent and informative will put you on the short list when your clients are ready to buy.
2. Free downloads of products and or services has viral marketing potential, if what you're offering is worth telling friends about - your site visitors will surely tell their friends and colleagues about it, who in turn will tell their friends and colleagues about your free offer and before you know it... you're viral - sending an obscene amount of traffic to your website.
3. You can offer a free software download or trial of your product with limited functionality that can be easily upgraded to the fully functional paid version with all the bells and whistles your customers really wanted in the first place.
4. Free download of graphic or fashion images can be a great source of free advertising for your design company. Many people use images on blogs and websites and throughout social media networks. Be sure to place your web address and copyright information on the images or request that your site visitors credit the images to your design company though backlinks or photo credit on their websites.
5. And lastly, by simply having the phrase" free download" as part of your page content helps when users are searching by keywords, which is a great way to end up on the SERPs of major search engine for the 89000 customers looking for "free downloads".

IF YOU LIKE THIS ARTICLE YOU CAN SUBSCRIBE TO MY RSS FEED

Sponsor  iPage - Small business web hosting $3.50/mo!!