I’ve been seriously researching (and experimenting with) video as an online marketing tool recently. There are perfect examples of successful viral marketing campaigns with videos. But this is not what I wanted to emphasize (and ask your opinion about) in this post.

What I wanted to focus on in this short post is: how engaging a video can be.

We’ve seen great examples of how a video can create buzz and get the word out, how it can be used to visualize the message and how it can work as a link magnet. But have we seen enough videos that are really engaging?

I can’t say I have come across a lot of good engaging videos – have you?

Below I am listing just a couple of examples I was able to find – are you aware of more? That would be a great help in my research!

1. Integrating Sign-up Process Right within the Video: Oxfam

Oxfam ACT FAST program, which teaches citizens about poverty and hunger, has been launched recently with the compelling message and smart promotion campaign. The program video player allows viewers to join Oxfam within the video itself, making it easy to get involved:

2. Engaging with Playful Experience: The PEN Story

Last year Able Reach discovered this video for me which is

…engaging and it’s got my mind going all perkity perk – it’s creative, interesting, playful, easy to understand, feels like there is more, and makes me want to keep looking.

If a web site made me feel like that *and* made it easy for me to get what I want, I could see myself telling other people about both the site and the products it sells.

The video lacks a clear-cut call to action but it is engaging nonetheless!

Any other good examples you can come up with? Please share them in the comments!

Post image by Rennett Stowe

No related posts.

The internet is no longer text-based, and with more pictures, videos, and graphics online, technology has also gotten smarter and able to translate these images into something more tangible. Before all this technology started booming, search engines were not able to “read” an image on a website. So web developers would give the image an alt tag and name it so they could know what it was about.

But those days are about to come to an end. With facial recognition technology just warming up to the consumer world, images are no longer unreadable.

Computers read your face like a QR code and find other images of you that exist online. And as we well know, with the social media craze in its prime, there are many images of ourselves out there that we probably don’t even know exist. Someone at a party or friend’s house may take your picture without your knowledge and within 2 hours it is posted on Facebook or Flickr.

Hiding Behind Moniker or Several Online Personas?

With facial recognition technology any picture that looks like you can easily be found in a matter of moments, even the ones you wish didn’t exist. Hiding behind a fake name or pseudonym will be a thing of the past as all of your aliases will be easily found by your potential employer or mate.

A recent study showed that 90% of people use their real names on their Facebook profiles. And with most people using a picture of their faces for their profile pics, it makes it simple and easy to find out who someone really is. Say you just met someone and you want to know more about them. You can instantly take their picture and search for it online and find all of those matches, and see some of their info on their Facebook page as well. After all, we all have Facebook profiles don’t we?

Managing Your Brand and Privacy Online

Some people are now advocating that we change our Facebook profile pictures so we are not at risk of privacy concerns. For while it is convenient to be able to find out if someone has a double life online, it is also scary when you consider that perfect strangers can find all of your once private information online just by having a picture of your face.

I am not saying you should go out and change your profile picture to protect your identity. But this new technology does raise a few concerns about how private our lives really are. The internet has made the private things public, and while this has shamed a lot of politicians lately, it can also expose a major security threat to your identity. And with it being easier than ever to retrieve someone’s personal information using the internet, it’s also more important than ever to have a plan for protecting your identity.

Jon is a guest writer for this post and also writes for www.Safeidentityprotection.com where you can compare the best identity theft protection services to find which one is right for you. He also has Id theft service reviews like Lifelock reviews to help consumers see what kind of protection each program offers.

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by dequoi

Related posts:

1. Ann Smarty’s Profile
2. SEOsmarty Privacy Policy

What’s in a name? In business, everything, and though “by any other name would smell as sweet” a business has more chances of becoming profitable if its name is catchy, memorable and strong. Think Coca-Cola, Xerox, Nike, Sony, Ford,  and so many others.

But let’s think online companies, since this is our main business environment. Think Google, Twitter, Facebook, Digg. Would these companies be as successful with other names, more descriptive? Hardly.

Yet many online businesses consider branding a form of satisfying the search engines first. Many business names today are highly descriptive – focused on keywords rather than people. The “dot.com” era created the annoying branding habit of adding a .com at the name too. Expedia has ditched the .com from its name, but there are a number of sites that still keep it, the few that survived the dot.com crash.

Choosing a name for an online business is a challenging proposition. It’s hard to stand out from the crowd without a good name. Things become even harder when the brand has to match a domain name – and to protect a business against brand jacking, this is obviously a must.

You can start a business plan without the business name, but you cannot launch the business without the brand that will make it stand out. There are rare cases of re-branding that involve name-changing, but more often than not, changing a name does not make a business better known – in fact, it could obscure previous branding efforts.

• The easy way would be to acquire naming software like WordMaker. But this is not enough. In addition to using a name generator software, you have to research  the market and make sure that the name you chose is not already in use by other company.
• Here is where Trademarkia can help – the largest visual search engine for more than 6 million trademarked logos, names, and slogans on the Internet. They also provide, for a fee, trade mark registration services, legal advice and more.
• To avoid the hassle, you could hire a brand naming professional, and there are plenty swimming in the pond.
• VAYTON Brand Capital for example, is interesting because, aside naming services, they also offer an international intellectual property (IP) management platform.
• The Brand Institute is probably the less affordable solution, as it’s working with the “heavy industry players.” You’ll find names like Alcatel, AT&T, Avon, BP, Black&Decker and many others in their portfolio.
• Nomen is quite a name too… having worked with the likes of Lancôme, Microsoft, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Renault and more. Even their own brand is a strong testimony.
• CatchWord Branding specialize in all aspects of brand name development, including product and company naming, brand strategy, initial legal screening, and linguistic analysis.
• You can even crowdsource your brand name, with services like crowdSPRING.

Whatever option you choose, the moment you have a name you like, you need to check that it is not already in use by others – to avoid trademark issues and copyright infringement trials. If the name is available, you’ll need to book the matching domain. With names no one else has, this should be relatively easy. Don’t postpone this: you’d be surprised to see how fast the domain you need can be booked by someone else after you performed an online search for available domains.

Last but not least, register your brand. It’s not that expensive, and it instantly makes your business more valuable.

Post image by Orin Zebest

Related posts:

1. Colorize Your Brand – How Color Builds Your Brand
2. 15.4 Tips to Brand Your Domain Name
3. How to Watermark Your Images and PDF Files for Brand Awareness and Copyright Protection

The following is the the first post in the series of guest blogging success stories. The series is dedicated to my new venture My Blog Guest, the community of guest bloggers. I am building the site where you can build links and your brand completely for free and by providing real quality, so go ahead: join, participate and help me build it!

The guest post was provided by Glen Allsopp, a talented writer and a well-known blogger who has been building his name by guest blogging.

When I go at new things, I go at them full-force. Naturally, I only take on projects that I’m very passionate about, so the ones I do take on get my absolute attention. When I started a brand new blog mid-way through 2008, things were no different.

The blog I was starting would probably be best defined as a member of the ‘personal development’ niche. A site that helps people with life struggles, productivity, motivation and things like time-management. Something that I was very interested in at the time.

Although I classed myself as a very good internet marketer, I was a total nobody in the personal development niche. I had a new blog and no audience. I decided that instead of going down the usual methods of blog promotion I would try a new strategy to get myself more readers: write blog posts for other sites.

Guest Posts

Guest posts make total sense and provide a winning situation for multiple parties. First of all, the blogger who is accepting a guest post on their site gets free, quality content for their audience. The audience of that blog gets great content to read. The writer of the article gets a link from the post and potentially new subscribers on their site.

As long as the post is of a high quality, everybody wins.

People have been advocating the benefits of guest posting for years, and it’s nothing new. But these people usually recommend it on a small scale. I had the idea of guest posting thanks to Leo Babauta from Zen Habits who claimed that it helped him grow his site so quickly. (I think it was the 50+ digg homepages, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt).

I started writing. And I wrote some more. I took a break. And then continued to write. Instead of writing a post a month or even a post a week, I wrote 2-3 every single week. I wrote more guest posts than anyone else I had ever seen writing them, and things were going well.

Subscribers were up massively, traffic was up, and the links back to the website were now in the thousands. Guest blogging was really taking off for me. In the space of a few months I had written nearly 40 individual guest posts for other websites and was now enjoying a feed count of over 4,000 subscribers.

A Five-Figure Income

I don’t like to reveal exactly how much money I make, but through blogging alone in 2009 I made well over $50,000. This is completely through blog that was built from scratch; not any of the other sites I run. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if I had not written one guest post in the last 12 months, that figure would be more like $10,000-$20,000.

You see, I think there really is no effective way to market a blog these days. I mean, you can spend hours interacting on forums or blog comments and hoping to get a few clicks. Or, you can spend an hour writing a quality article that shows a brand new audience what you’re about a get both links and traffic to your site.

To me it was a no-brainer, so I kept the strategy going.

In fact, this worked so well that guest posts on some sites would send me over 400 subscribers. That’s right, one article could really increase my feed count so much. Do this on the scale I was doing things, and you start to see how I became successful.

Now that you’ve seen the power of guest posting, let me share some final tips.

Tips from My Experience

Based on everything I have learned over the past year, I just have three main points to make:

• Vary Your Posting: Some people just focus on the biggest sites and that’s it. Instead, I wrote for the ‘small fish’ and the ‘big guys’. Both improve the number of backlinks to your site and you never know when a small fish could become a great contact or even a big fish.
• Send it and See: Most people think it’s not only polite but also ‘right’ to ask a blog author if they like a blog post idea first before sending it. I definitely think it is more polite, but I wouldn’t say it’s the best thing to do. Instead, in my experience, I have simply wrote articles I think other bloggers would like and I send it to them. Then they can clearly say yes or no with the content in front of them.
• Accept Rejection: If someone doesn’t want you to write on their site or they don’t like the content you’ve wrote, just accept it. There have been plenty of sites who didn’t think my work was good enough for them, yet Technorati Top 100 blogs that loved my writing. Rejection doesn’t mean anything about you specifically as a person, so just accept it with grace and move on.

So, you still don’t think guest blogging is ineffective, do you?

This article was written by Glen Allsopp who blogs about Viral Marketing. As you can see, he is a big advocate of guest posting.

Got a guest blogging success story? Send it to me and I’ll spread the word! seosmarty@gmail.com

Related posts:

1. 6 Benefits of Guest Blogging + 9 Tips for Better Guest Blogging
2. Guest Blogging Services by Ann Smarty
3. Beyond (SEO) Niche Blogging and Branding

Having a couple of hours of free time on the holidays, (instead of having at least some rest) I decided to take time looking for the ways to brand my images and PDfs I spread online.

Basically I was looking for some basic tools that would place a cute watermark on any images I want and I can tell you, finding a really useful and usable tool was not easy.

Anyway, I figured that some of my readers might be interested in that too – so I am sharing my tips here: some free useful watermarking utilities to identify and brand your images and PDF files:

Watermarking PDF files

Most PDF editors and converters are paid, I was really happy to discover one which is free, feature-rich and bug-free: PDFill

Just download and install the tool (the tool requires Ghostscript but don’t worry, the tool will install it automatically if you allow to) and run it. You will be able to access its multiple features – among them: text or image watermarks:

The process of adding an image watermark is quick and easy:

1. Point the tool to the .pdf document you want to watermark;

2. Point the tool to the image that will serve as a watermark;

3. Customize the watermark settings:

4. Save the watermarked copy and you are done!

Watermarking Images (Free)

Free Desktop Watermark Creators

Fast Water Mark

(Free download here)

The tool allows to create a text watermark and adjust its font, color, opacity and position. It only processes one image at a time:

Photo Watermark

(Free download here)

This one does have the bulk image processing feature but is a bit more limited in look and feel customization:

Java Watermark

(Free download here)

Don’t be fooled by the simplistic interface: the output is not bad at all. This one creates image watermarks and can also process only one image at a time:

And here’s a short overview of the three tools listed above for you to quickly compare:

Free Online Watermark Creators

An online tool is only good unless you need it daily. When it comes to online watermarking tools, you won’t b able to find anything fancy but there’s no excuse for not checking one: they are all free and require no registration.

Let’s see how it works by trying one of them: PicMarkr

Select up to 5 images (either from your computer or from Facebook, Flickr or Picasa) and choose the watermark properties (text or image);

Click “Next step” and either download the watermarked image back to your computer or save the watermarked copy to your web album:

As far as you can see, easy, fast and fun.

Here’s the overview of best free online watermark tools:

Post image src: blogs.chron.com

Related posts:

1. Colorize Your Brand – How Color Builds Your Brand
2. How To Optimize Images For Search Engines, Social Media and People
3. No, You Are NOT Allowed to Use Any Flickr Images

FYI: One year after this post was published, we decided to launch the community of guest bloggers for people interested in guest blogging. So please go ahead and join: MyBlogGuest

(photo by insunlight)

New Audience: Guest posting will open up your blog to a new audience that may not have previously read your work. As long as you write something that catches their interest, they will curiously click through to your blog to see what else you have to offer.

More RSS Subscribers: Once they click through to your blog, if visitors find information that is either informative, entertaining and/or useful, they will most likely subscribe to your RSS feed to see what you are going to publish in the future. Keep in mind that in order to draw visitors (and potential RSS subscribers) to your blog, you need to write an amazing guest post that piques their interest.

Win-Win Situation: When it comes to guest blogging, both bloggers benefit from this arrangement. The guest blogger gets to expose their content to a new audience, while the other blogger gets a great free piece of exclusive content to publish.

Networking: Since a good guest blogger should be replying to reader comments, this is a great opportunity to start conversations with new readers. Not only can you establish new relationships through comments, but other people’s thoughts can also be a great tool for thinking of new topics for your future posts.

Fresh Perspective: If you are normally a solo blogger, then having a guest blogger is a great way to add a fresh perspective to your blog. This works even better if the guest blogger has a slightly different area of expertise that they can share with your readers.

(photo by morphyne)

Different Social Networks and Reach: Each of the bloggers may utilize different social networks, and have varying amounts of reach on each one. For example, my main social networks are on Twitter, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Blog Catalogue. Although I don’t have the strongest presence on Digg, I can work with a guest blogger that does (but doesn’t necessarily have a strong StumbleUpon profile). Since we will both be trying to promote each guest post through our various social networks, our combined efforts will give our content a farther reach.

This combined effort creates what I like to call “Social Media Synergy”. If you want to see “Social Media Synergy” in action, just check your analytics program a day or two after guest posting, and I know that you will be happy with the increase in traffic that you see.

Link Building: Although this last one is pretty obvious, it’s definitely a nice benefit of guest posting. Like my bio below, you can include some information about yourself (along with a link or two back to your blog and website), and this will provide you with a quality backlink to help your SEO efforts.

If you know of other benefits of guest posting, please let Ann and I know by leaving a comment!

This is a guest post by Gerald Weber. Gerald is the President and Founder of Search Engine Marketing Group, which is a leading search engine marketing and web development firm in Houston, TX. Gerald also maintains an  Houston SEO blog.

*I would like to give a special thanks to Ann for not only introducing me to the concept of guest blogging, but for also being kind enough to allow me to write a post for her wonderful blog!

Related posts:

1. The Ethics of Guest Posting – Am I Wrong?
2. How Guest Blogging Made Me 5-Figures in 2009
3. 4 Reasons Why I Started Blogging

You might have already noticed (after my color branding, SEO Slogans and branding outside SEO) that I’m particularly interested in overall SEO niche marketing and branding recently – well, that’s all because I am just starting promoting my brand and service and so the topic seems new and exciting to me. Today I am going to share my thoughts and observations on SEO logos and banners.

Now what is the purpose of a company logo?

• It gives visual representation of a professional SEO company service/product (and thus accounts for its positive associations);
• It establishes a brand identity (making it unique and memorable).

Most important logo features are:

• trustworthy (<= professional);
• catchy/memorable (<= unique);
• associative/symbolic (=> conveying feelings, and sending a message…);
• matching the overall design;
• clean and functional.

How Can SEO Be Graphically Described?

1) It can be represented as ‘growth‘ (e.g. growth in rankings, profit, etc).

Example: SeoDesignSolutions

(Note: I would have made it left-to-right growth though to make look more understandable for US and European people who are believed to think (as well as read) from left to right):

2) Uniqueness (the service that makes you stand out).

Example: SearchEnginePeople:

3) The high quality of the service itself.

Example: a star by AdvanceRankings:

4) High level of professionalism/expertise.

Example: (well, besides myself) SearchEngineJournal:

Except for describing the service itself there are other types:

Type	Example URL	Example Logo
Abstract graphic symbol	Distilled.co.uk
Unique well branded image	SearchEngineGuide
Domain/brand Name	ViperChill

Get Inspiration:

• 56 Most Creative Logos – lists great examples to follow.
• Logo collection – another list of creative logos.

Related posts:

1. Does Your Blog Have a Flavor?
2. Color Branding: Geographic and Niche Targeting
3. Brand Naming Online – a Double Challenge

A movie poster usually determines whether or not I am going to watch the trailer or even go to the cinema. A website design is usually a crucial factor in making the decision whether a visitor is going to look through headlines and stay for some time to read the article or review the products or services. A movie poster is usually meant to:

• call to action – i.e. encourage to watch a movie;
• set expectations = find its targeted audience (e.g. people who prefer comedies to horror movies);
• establish the brand – i.e. make a movie name recognizable;
• start the buzz (e.g. “Have you seen that movie poster?“);

All in all, just the same what we want a website design to do. By studying the techniques behind creating a movie poster, we can learn some essential web design principles:

1. Don’t underestimate the power of colors. Dark neutral hues usually mean that’s a horror movie or thriller while bright colors always set expectations of an amusing comedy (same goes about a website design – color choice may determine what a visitor will first think about, his feelings and actions):

2. Focus on your product most powerful side = e.g. if there is a celebrity starring in a movie, its poster usually gives his/her image prominence. (Choose what you are going to focus on: brand your name or your image. Don’t try to do both – or you will frustrate your visitor):

3. Create and implement a catchy relevant slogan. Make sure it reveals your website content, catches attention and sticks in the memory:

4. Even fonts matter. Have you ever noticed that a fantasy film poster is usually distinguished by specific (usually orange or red) ancient-looking cursive fonts while psychological thrillers are usually depicted with the help of plain non-ornamented proportionately-spaced fonts? (Fonts should reflect the overall website style and content)

5. Add images that clearly describe what your website is about – a vivid image is what a person will associate with a movie. (Like we already know, images are not the first thing a visitor sees when entering a website; but that’s imaginary that can get a visitor interested and foster sticky associations)

6. Sometimes minimum of elements that makes your site stand out – don’t add to many elements; focus on what is really important.

7. Set expectations. Make sure your visitor will instantly understand what your website is about. Everything matters: the words, the colors, the fonts, the imaginary, the prominence of some elements, even the gestures of the characters:

Related posts:

1. How To Effectively Test Website Design and Functionality
2. Colorize Your Brand – How Color Builds Your Brand
3. 3 Bad Examples of Landing Pages – Will You Buy it?

The benefits of niche blogging are well-known: that’s a proven way to attract loyal audience who will be visiting your site and interact with you; applying niche blogging basics also allows you to generate organic search traffic by focusing on niche related keywords and highly relevant inlinks.

But is it also as good for actually making money (ROI)? As an example, if you offer services related to your blog topic, that’s not always wise to limit your audience exclusively to this sphere. Blogging about SEO and by this advertising your SEO services (like me), you are most likely to be interested in all webmasters (as that’s who your potential clients are); likewise operating a small jewelry related website, you are most likely to be targeting audience interested in a broader topic like fashion and modern trends; furthermore with many verticals (like travel for example) you want all people to know about your site (as any of us travels from time to time). Being popular outside your niche is another great marketing opportunity that should not be overlooked.

So how to both blog inside and outside your niche (and not to fall between two stools)?

1. Play with your own blog content. Some techniques I am experimenting with (or planning to) throughout this blog are:

• write both entertaining and industry related articles (e.g. my color branding series). This will appeal both to your niche and non-niche friends. I for one try to offer some fun or actionable advice in each of my posts;
• introduce ‘blog columns‘ (e.g. Wasabi (i.e. Social) Wednesdays at SEOMoz). This will encourage your non-niche readers to come back regularly;
• use generally understandable and universal stylistic techniques (e.g. humour is one of the proven methods to expand your readership).

2. Guest post at blogs belonging to a ‘neighbouring’ niche (e.g. tell web designers how to create both appealing and SEO friendly website).

3. Take part in non-niche group writing projects and blog network (I am not a professional web designer but I like to explore the topic and take part in graphic design related writing projects; I have also had some positive experience participating in Don’s home based business project). You can check this site to get updated of the writing projects around the Internet.

4. Participate in social media. A while ago I posted on niche social networking (that makes you an industry influencer). Soon after that I realized non-niche (general) social networking is as well essential, though for SEO industry it might be also risky (once you go popular as an SEO in social media, you will instantly be labelled as ‘spammer’ there). Anyway taking part in general social media sites helped me meet new people outside SEO (and that resulted in very promising business connections).

These were my methods of blogging and branding beyond SEO sphere. Most of them are at experimenting phase, so I need your experience and thoughts. How do you manage to balance between niche and general blogging?

• Post images: Urban Pyramid, Equilibrista, Beyond the Boundary and now into Explore too…

Related posts:

1. Color Branding: Geographic and Niche Targeting
2. 9 Approaches To StumbleUpon Niche Marketing
3. 6 Benefits of Guest Blogging + 9 Tips for Better Guest Blogging

A while ago I posted an article on color branding categorizing some general color symbolism theory. It resulted in a discussion over at SU where I was (fairly enough) criticized for looking only at one side of the medal. Really color perception differs from country to country and from niche to niche. Color theory deserves the whole separate blog to cover it and I outlined only some main points. Well, these comments encouraged me to look further into the topic and while it isn’t directly related to SEO or social media I regularly cover, I figured color in branding and web design is an interesting topic worth sharing with my readers.

Color branding: geographic targeting

Color symbolism is very area specific. Color associations vary depending on the national history, traditions and religion. Here is a popular example demonstrating the importance of color research before targeting a new area: when United Airlines expanded the service to Tokyo, their brand color was white. But the company had soon to change it to red, because in Japan, white can be associated with death and mourning.

However not everything is that simple, even within one country one and the same color may evoke quite opposing associations (see ‘red’ that can have both positive and negative associations of courage and sin in the USA).

(Based on ‘Color Meanings Around the World‘ and Colour Journal)

There is no such a thing as ‘universal’ color. Even a positive color like green (associated with Nature and growth in most countries) may denote death in South America and countries with dense jungle areas.

The best (and proven) way to target a specific country is to use its national colors – that always evoke positive associations of something familiar and trustworthy. For example, in Argentina where beer is a very popular product, a company called Quilmes has quickly become #1 due to national color branding (compare) and a more successful Coca Colla competitor in Peru Inca Kola managed to outdo the universal monster only thanks to sticking to the country’s national palette.

Color branding: niche targeting

Color choice in your website or brand logo design may be determined by a niche you are targeting. Again, there is no clear line between using some specific color for a vertical worldwide. For an instance, ‘red’ associated with debt and crisis in the US (e.g. it denotes a drop in stock prices) and hence avoided in ‘finance’ niche, has quite opposite associations in Eastern Asia where it is used to denote a rise in stock prices.

(Based on ‘color meaning article’)

Color branding: mood

Colors and hues may create certain mood on a psychological level – this is most often a universal color effect used by prominent artists for a long time. The well-known master of playing with colors Vincent van Gogh said he didn’t like expressing what he saw directly, instead he used color to render the mood of the picture. Van Gogh’s painting The Night Café is the best example of the effect colors (and combination of colors) can make on a person:

‘In my picture of the Night Café, I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime.’

Here is the painting (do you feel what the artist tried to express?):

Now look what happens if we paint the same piece in blue:

See? There is no more depressing effect you might have felt with burning red and yellow contrasted to green hues. Blue instantly makes the atmosphere calming and refreshing. (You can try more color exercises here)

Some Fun?

Today as part of my traditional blog fun, I decided to share a few great color tools to play with.

• Create a color pattern (this seosmarty-header-like color pattern took me only 2 minutes to create):

• Generate a color palette (very helpful when you want to create a design around an image):

This post is intended to be part of Graphic Design Group Writing Project.

Post image: Autumn

Related posts:

1. Beyond (SEO) Niche Blogging and Branding
2. Colorize Your Brand – How Color Builds Your Brand
3. 9 Approaches To StumbleUpon Niche Marketing