My Best Design Blog Content Development Tip

I’m sure we’ve all seen those nifty, set of to-do lists and whiz bang cure-alls for developing your business graphic design blog.  I know this is true because I have downloaded a few of these articles myself, printed them, and promptly put them in my IN basket to get to later.  But as client projects (and their demands) swallow up work time, it seems  I rarely get to that IN basket and my design blog’s development priorities fall lower and lower on the “must do” list.

The #1 Best tip or bit of advice I can offer boils down to this—keep at it or like the proverbial turtle in the picture above (the turtle from Aesop’s fable), just keep plodding away!  Developing your graphic design blog is not a sprint, it’s more like a marathon, so setting your mind to chipping away at your blog development week by week will get you a lot further than trying to get everything done all at once.  You won’t get overwhelmed, since hopefully you already have your client’s work making demands on your time and can invest a few hours of your precious time per week.  Remember…Time is Money.

Trust me on this… prepare yourself for the long haul and try to update  your graphic design blog  on a consistent basis which works out to roughly an average of four blog posts a month or one blog post a week.  This works out to a two to three hour minimum investment of your time per week to your graphic design blog marketing, especially  if you are a solo graphic designer.  Just my idea of a great tip to get you started on the right track  in 2013!

6 Reasons to Begin Blogging for Your Graphic Design Business

Most graphic designers, freelance workers or entrepreneurs know by now, that blogging is quickly becoming an important and relatively inexpensive tool for online marketing and self promotion.  Back in the 90s, in the early days of internet marketing, web designers and graphic designers were busy designing and creating mostly static websites for their clients.  However, blogging and the use of blogs has grown exponentially with the development and refining of blogging platforms such as Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

These blogging platforms have made it much easier to develop and set up a website (or internet presence) for a variety of purposes without requiring advanced technical and programming knowledge.  According to Technorati (in their annual  2011 State of the Blogosphere Report),  3 million blogs come online per month!

When blogging became popular, around July of 2004, there were about 3 million blogs online and as of the end of Dec 2011, there were approximately 178 million blogs on the internet!  Please see chart below, designed by Invesp.

Spring Cleaning – 3 Quick Tips to Clean Up or Freshen Your Blog Design

When spring rolls around , across the nation, there usually is a mad rush to get household cleaning out of the way, you know the kind of household cleaning that gets into a little more detail like scrubbing floors, washing windows, etc. the work that goes beyond the daily household chores.  (Or maybe you don’t know, because your lucky enough to hire out this task.)

In any case, have you considered that you should be doing the same thing for your blog or website’s design? You should consider checking out your own blog usually on a quarterly basis at minimum.  The following three points should help you to get you started.

1.        Analyze Your Website or Blog Statistics

By the time spring rolls around, usually the first three months of the year have gone by and you should be taking some time to analyze your quarterly web stats .  The three month average can give you some good insight into daily traffic, average visitors per day, overall monthly visits etc., and all the data you need to develop plans for the coming year. As a matter of fact, the WordPress blogging format, usually allows you to evaluate your site’s statistics on a quarterly basis as one of its backend features.   Of course, it will depend on your website’s peak business time or objective, but having these numbers to compare can give you good information for developing plans or make adjustments to your website’s content or design for the next following months.

2.       Observe new trends in  Graphic Design

Without that much internet research, you can get a handle on what design styles or design graphics are trending or popular that you might want to incorporate into your blog or website.  No, it doesn’t mean you are going to make drastic changes in order to follow a design trend  or fad but you might want to consider new design styles  or graphics to freshen up your blog or website’s look and still maintain your particular branding or style.  Keep in mind that you draw traffic from your website’s images as well as other graphics.  Make sure that all your images are SEO optimized with pertinent keywords.

3.       Replace or Upgrade images or pics that do not generate web activity on Online Portfolios or other Social Media sites

With so many other stats to follow or consider, most blog or website owners ( especially graphic designers) don’t actively consider checking the statistics that the images on their blog or other web assets generate.  Graphic designers are often too busy upgrading other website owners blog or websites and all too often fail to consider their own.  Remember this tip  includes picture and image collections,  online portfolios and other pics and images on social media accounts.  Just a few tweaks and changes can refresh your site and boost traffic and generate more interest in your blog or website. The engagement you develop will improve how people find you and provide more sources for potential clients to review your work.

Juggling Work Tasks: The Ups and Downs Of Freelance Work

First the background story…

I have been plugging away at this internet thing for several months (maybe two years in other internet or online projects), and  believe me it requires consistency, consistency, consistency.  Funny thing,  but many of  those pricey internet marketing gurus don’t seem to prepare you for the day that all your hard work starts paying off and your blog starts gaining traction. Okay, I’m not talking rock star blog and visits; but, at least a consistent and growing flow of traffic (and I thank you).

Back a few years ago, I had gone through the labor of creating a static brochure type website, paid for the hosting and posted my content to the internet.  Results?  My website had very few visits,  it was way off the Information Highway so to speak, something like a billboard about a few miles off a desert highway!  Not the kind of way you want to start your internet marketing journey, by any means.  I didn’t realize the number one thing about developing a small business, especially graphic designers (besides the skill and/or product you have to offer)… is that you have to learn how to market it and generate traffic to your website.

I was ready to throw in the towel; however, I started reading and wading through quite a few  “How to Develop Your Blog” type of blogs in order to get a handle on the internet publishing  and marketing ropes.  And it seems some of that advice, at least the advice I have taken the time to implement,  is beginning to pay off.