In this guest article, writer Alvina Lopez highlights the benefits of writing guest posts to build your brand.

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As a freelance writer who has worked primarily online, I can think of no better, fairly recent phenomenon for bloggers of all sorts than guest posting. While most guest post gigs aren’t paid, it’s an incredible opportunity to grow your brand or spread the word about your writing organically.

What’s more, there are a host of other benefits that come with the territory. It truly is a win-win situation for bloggers who accept guest posts as well as for bloggers who write them. Here’s why you should get on the guest post bandwagon:

1. It brings more traffic to your site.
This is the most obvious draw of writing guest posts. When you submit a post to another blog, and in your byline you list your own blog, you’ll be potentially drawing an entirely new set of readers to discover the writing you put out on your own platform.

Of course, this means you have to place a strong emphasis on writing quality articles that directly appeal to the readers of the blog to which you are submitting. Just churning out tons of low-quality guest posts doesn’t by proxy equate to more traffic on your own site.

2. It establishes you as an expert in various fields.
Just as in the real world, on the blogosphere and the Internet at large, reputation is everything. If you write for high-quality, heavily trafficked sites in niches about which you know a lot, you’ll soon earn a solid reputation as your guest posts are retweeted and spread organically.

Establishing this sort of reputation as an expert is an instrumental part of growing your blog and your brand.

3. It improves your writing.
Writing guest posts poses a unique challenge that you won’t contend with writing for your own blog. When you write guest posts, you must learn to strike a balance between adhering to the general style and subject of the blog, while still giving the readers a fresh voice and perspective.

You’ll also have to read the blog extensively to figure out what, precisely, the typical reader wants. All these considerations naturally make you a more versatile and skilled writer.

4. It’s an easy way to build connections with other bloggers.
There’s an inherent community aspect to guest blogging that, at least in my opinion, is just as gratifying as receiving more traffic and establishing your reputation. Even if only virtually, writing guest posts will enable you to meet bloggers from all over the Internet.

The mutual exchange of fresh content for recognition is a wonderful way in which bloggers can learn from one another. Especially considering that there’s so much junk and black hat tricks out there on the Internet, guest blogging is an honest and wholesome breath of fresh air. It helps others, while in the process helping you as well. What could be better than that?

About this guest author
Alvina Lopez is a freelance writer and blog junkie, who blogs about accredited online colleges. She welcomes your comments, email her at alvina.lopez@gmail.com Image credit.

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Want to grow your brand? Start writing guest posts

Due to receiving a steady stream of enquiries about submitting guest articles, I thought an F.A.Q. was in order. If you are a writer interested in submitting content to www.andrewkeir.com, please read the following.

A few simple rules, I’m sure none of them will come as a surprise.

• Relevant subject matter – Submitted articles must obviously be relevant to this website. Topics discussed on www.andrewkeir.com include branding, logo design, stationery design, SEO & social networking, blogging, web design and other graphic design related topics. If you are looking to submit articles related to any of the above fields then this is the place for you.
• Outbound links – Outbound links are fine where appropriate and relevant to the subject at hand. Articles bloated with links/anchor text without editorial value will not be accepted. (All outbound links may have the rel="nofollow" tag at my discretion.)
• Unique, quality content – Articles must be of suitable quality and should be unique to www.andrewkeir.com. If you are submitting/syndicating the same article across loads of other websites then thank you, but no thank you.
• Author credit – Naturally you will be credited as the author for the article, and you’re welcome to include a short byline promoting your services and website.

  You’re obviously welcome (encouraged, in fact) to promote the article through your own channels for mutual benefit.

Good? Good.

If you’d like to become a guest author, contact me via this page; please don’t leave a comment here. Image credit.

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Information for guest authors

Yes, I have a Google+ Account, and while it is something I expect to be productive in the future, I can’t help but share the sentiments expressed in UK illustrator Jamie Smart’s “review” of Google Plus as illustrated above.

There are 40+ social network/online bookmarking/sharing platforms that I’m aware of and the list is growing. Unless you don’t require sleep, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to productively use them all.

There are of course bookmarking services that post your content to a number of websites simultaneously, but without regular attention to the “social” side of social networking this only has limited benefits.

In the past I’ve experimented with many of the social network with mixed success. Stumbleupon in particular for me has resulted in either feast or famine when it comes to referred traffic, with some posts receiving up to 20,000 visits and others receiving literally a handful.

Quality and the popularity of content on other platforms also seems to have no correlation, with quality, informative posts that regularly deliver good traffic via Google doing poorly while “list posts” or other short n’ sweet content which doesn’t rank too highly in SERP’s doing very well.

Despite the initial negative vibe that may have been inferred at the beginning of my post, I do plan to use Google+ in the future, but it has long since reached the point where other networks simply have to go.

Where will you be spending your time?

With the recent re-design of my WordPress theme now complete, and after little experimentation and consideration on what works best, I’ll be spending my time on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, Digg and of course Google+ (the links are for following me if you feel so inclined…).

Will you be spending your time on Google+?

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A concise Google plus review

Just about every WordPress blog theme displays the date a post was published which can be useful to your readers, if the date isn’t relevant to your posts however it can be disruptive to the appearance of your content is Google’s SERPS.

By using javascript instead of php code ( as is standard in WordPress themes ), the date/time will be shown in the exact same fashion as your current theme, but Google will ignore that piece of information and not show the date stamp before your meta description in the SERPS. Here’s how you make the change.

On most WordPress themes the 3 files you will need to update is your index.php to update your homepage, single.php to update your individual posts and archive.php to update your archives if you index them. More files may need updating depending on your theme. As always if your not 100% sure what you’re doing back-up your theme before making any changes.

Head into the appropriate file and find the php code which inserts the date with each post, it will look something like this:

<?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?>

Replace the code with the following:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">document.write("<?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?>");</script>

The change will turn this:

Into this:

Much better!

Now you should be free to make the most of the limited and valuable space available for your pages meta descriptions, without the date stamp getting in the way.

The change won’t be instant of course, but your root level page should update quickly while your remaining posts will update over the next few days/weeks depending on how often Google crawls your page.

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After deleting the daily dose of spam from my blog earlier, I got to thinking… Between the spam filters, nofollow links and site administrators defending their blogs, is any of it getting through?

Over the years I’ve visited hundreds of blogs, if not more, and only 2-3 occasions come to mind where an obviously spammed comment is actually displayed on a site. Just about everyone has spam protection or filters or some sort on their site, WordPress has shipped with one for quite some time now. At the least, comment spam is immediately recognisable in 99% of cases and easily dealt with.

The only place I can imagine said comments getting through to is the occasional abandoned site, which due to that very fact are less likely to be found. And when found any link left obviously won’t carry much weight from and SEO point of view.

I realise the majority of spam is automated bots, software etc. though initial set up is obviously required, and presumably some amount of ongoing work as well. However little the effort may be, with the absolute minimal amount of comments that get through, it would seem that doing just about anything else would be more productive.

What do you think?

If you’ve worked closely on combating spam in one way or another, or have any figures on the “miss” rate of filters etc. I’d be curious to know. Image credit.

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Are comment spammers getting anywhere?

We all know twitter is the latest and greatest online marketing tool, but people aren’t always forthcoming with any actual numbers or traffic gained from it. I happened to catch a post of mine being re-tweeted a few times the other day and thought I’d share the results.

My original post, 15 logo design disasters, was tweeted by a visitor to my site ( thanks @downwithdesign ) after which a meagre 14 people re-tweeted it. As a result, I received about 2,700 unique visitors from twitter alone, for that post, on that day.

This is small beans when compared to the viral potential of twitter, I get handfuls of these from time to time which is great. Fingers crossed and waiting for the big one.

How about you?

What sort of traffic does a tweet normally send your way?

Update 10/08/10: I’m afraid at the time of writing twitter refuses to show older tweets to allow me to give credit to the appropriate person, but I caught my post on the I Love New York logo design making the rounds yesterday, with 26 retweets bringing in about 3,400 unique visitors from twitter that day, for that post. Thanks to you, mystery tweeters.

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How much traffic do you get from a tweet?

I was speaking with a potential client shocked individual a few days ago, lets call her Sarah, about a potential new website, and it was interesting to hear her expectations on traffic to a brand new website.

Apparently it’s “outrageous” that she shouldn’t expect additional business to come pouring in through the website immediately, and with no additional marketing or promotion.

The website would likely have been only four or five pages, the only form of promotion intended for the site was it’s inclusion on invoicing and existing stationery etc. No social networking, or additional marketing, essentially the goal was to receive traffic from search engines alone.

When asked how long before decent traffic could be expected, I briefly explained a few things including the Google sandbox theory ( explained later ) and that, erring on the safe side, perhaps 6 months should be expected before significant traffic would be seen.

At this point the conversation quickly broke down and ultimately ended with Sarah forming the opinion that the entire venture was a waste of time and money before abruptly ending the call.

With the appropriate amount of time and a little effort, a website has the potential to be an incredible tool. It just doesn’t happen overnight.

Exactly how it works is open to debate, as Google isn’t very forthcoming with the details, but in a nutshell Google Sandbox is a penalty imposed on new websites to prevent them ranking highly in search engine results (SERPs). Your baby website is effectively placed in the Sandbox to play with the other kids for a few months until its all grown up and ready for the real word.

The primary reason for this is to prevent spam websites from being able to manipulate SERPs results to rank highly from the day of their launch, preventing them from successfully peddling there wares before being taken down/banned etc.

It also serves to separate new incomplete or abandoned sites from those that are going to last, many years ago it was fairly common for sites to rank well only to be “under construction” when visited and to not have any useful content.

While the sandbox is a pain for any legitimate web contributor who’s site is destined to last, ultimately it improves using the search engine as a whole. If your serious about your website, there’s no time like the present to get started.

Don’t be discouraged

Building big web traffic just takes time…

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It’s a long road – Building big web traffic

It’s nearly two years ago now that I converted my static HTML website to the blog you see before you. As this was my first blog and also my first WordPress theme some mistakes were to be expected. In retrospect though, there’s a lot I could have done better.

#1 A finished WordPress theme design.

I knew when I started that I wanted a clean, simple, content focused design to my site. 3 column, header and footer as you see before you. I was overly eager in wanting to get content posted, and once I had this basic layout and my design was approaching completion I began spending more time writing blog posts instead of finalising the design.

Due to the division of attention little flaws went unnoticed, sections of coding were sloppy or invalid, basically my site wasn’t being all it could be. Once the initial frenzy of posts slowed down I fixed all the issues, but I’d had been better off delaying the blogging itself for a few weeks and finishing the design.

#2 Quality & quantity of content.

“Content is king” as they say, but in the race for quantity the quality of some posts was extremely lacking. Posts/comments on YouTube videos, single logos with a pinch of copy that basically boiled down to “I really like this logo”, anything that was reasonably quick, easy and design related.

While these posts might warrant a quick glance they weren’t going to inspire any conversation (which somewhat defeats the purpose of a blog), weren’t very original and definitely weren’t going to gain any social momentum or backlinks.

As time went by the quality of my articles got better and in comparison the rushed posts looked even worse. When I reached around the 150 post mark I went back and deleted at least 50 articles that weren’t contributing to the quality of my blog.

In the time I wasted churning out these 50 I could have written 5 quality, interesting articles that would have served me far better.

#3 Planning for potential advertising.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I had the thought of advertising on my blog for a passive income, though as the design came together it wasn’t really taken into consideration. There are many standard sizes of advertising available and planning a web design around them is pretty flexible.

When looking into advertising more at a later date, I later found that the columns of my blog were not the correct size to accommodate the closest available ad formats.

Luckily I was only a few pixels out and was able to change the widths without any negative impact on the design. If and when I decide to monetize my blog further they will now drop into the design fine, but again it would have been time saved if I’d done this in the beginning.

#4 Social networking / bookmarking.

I suppose it’s fair to say search engines are where you want your site to perform best, but social networking and bookmarking sites are such a huge part of online marketing now-a-days that they’re hard to ignore.

I was originally of the opinion that twitter etc. was little more than people following each other for the purpose of promoting there own content while not actually caring about anyone else. It was about 7 months before I got involved with Twitter and Digg etc. and they’ve since turned into sources of significant traffic, links and the occasional bit of work.

Who knows what opportunities might have been missed. A front page article on Digg certainly would have kicked my site into gear early.

C’est la vie.

It’s easy of course to look back and see all the things you could have done better, but what can you do. With 250+ decent articles attracting business and traffic growing since the launch things are going good.

I’m in the process of launching a second blog at the moment, and armed with hindsight it’s coming together at twice the speed of the first. Hopefully this blog advice helps you do the same. Image credit.

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Mistakes to avoid when launching your blog

Advertising is an big part of many web sites and to make it work, targeted advertisements are essential.

Choosing static advertisements to display is easy. For example, stock imagery, printing services and finally web hosting and all fairly logical choices for a graphic design blog such as mine, where at least one of which will likely appeal to any visitor.

In theory, Google Adsense dynamically generates appropriate ads based on the content of your post. In theory…

Posts on printing should ideally display relevant services, web design posts might show hosting services and logo design posts might show services being offered by fellow designers. Without a little guidance however, Google doesn’t always get it right.

The bulk of my posts are about logo design, branding and corporate identity, followed closely by general graphic design then onto web design, printing, SEO and other related subjects.

Further down you’ll see Adsense ads being display at the end of this post and it would make sense that ads be shown in proportion to the above mentioned content, as things stood however 19 / 20 of my blog posts we’re followed by this:

The only content universal to my posts are my themes sidebars, however there is little regarding web between them and nothing about domain registration. For whatever reason Google decided the only thing suitable for my blog was this one domain registration service, regardless of what the post was actually about.

Obviously this isn’t ideal as the bulk of my advertisements were not likely to be of any interest to readers. By using tags to focus on or exclude content you can help steer your Google ads in a more relevant and profitable direction.

By encapsulating the post content of your website for inclusion, while excluding sidebars, footers and headers etc. more relevant ads should be displayed.

The following code can be used to specify relevant content.

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
This is relevant content that should be examined.
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

While this is used to exclude it.

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
This is content that should be ignored.
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

After adding this code to the appropriate sections of my blog I immediately began seeing advertisements I previous hadn’t seen in several months without it. The domain registration ad is still floating about, and while there is still an occasional irrelevant one the spread of content is a definite improvement.

Give it a go.

Better ads = more clicks = more income.

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How to use Adsense tags for more relevant advertisements

Whether Google’s pagerank is the cause or the result of a popular website is a topic of much debate, and while there are many theories as to the who/what/why/where/when of Google, cold hard facts are in short supply. My recent increase to page 3 and accompanying change in traffic has certainly left me wondering.

For the sake of this article lets just say traffic includes gaining backlinks, social networking and all the normal SEO, so I don’t have to repeat myself.

Many will tell you that you should work towards gaining a high pagerank which will in turn yield high traffic. Just as many will tell you that pagerank is just a reflection of your traffic and is the result of a popular site, not the reason for one.

While the latter certainly sounds more reasonable and is the theory I subscribe to, my own experience suggest otherwise. Above you will see my Google Analytics traffic for the last 7 or so months, and my jump to pagerank 3 in mid September.

The first 5 or so months of blogging on my new domain name ( at pagerank 0 ) were fairly unexciting as you can imagine. Averaged out, unique visits began at around 40 a day for the first month and made there way up to 400 or so by the 5th.

With the September pagerank update however you can see this dramatically changed. With a pagerank of 3, new blog posts began drawing in 2 to 4 thousand visits and general traffic is growing by around 50% per month.

While needing pagerank to get traffic instead of building traffic to get pagerank seems like a odd system, It’s hard to argue with these results.

What do you think?

What has your experience been with pagerank and its effects on your web traffic?

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A little extra pagerank seems to bring a lot of traffic

With the boom of social networking over the last few years, there’s a lot more traffic to be squeezed out of your website beyond just having good search engine optimization.

Social network and bookmarking sites such as Twitter, StumbleUpon and Digg have the potential to bring in huge traffic. And while every site can be found through search engines not every one is using these tools, giving you a potential leg up on the competition.

The only downside is social networking requires regular work, and getting to the front page of Digg etc. for a huge boost in exposure requires a little luck. There’s a lot of competition on social bookmarking sites and writing a fantastic article doesn’t guarantee it won’t slip through the cracks.

If you are fortunate enough to have an article land on the front page however, the results are undeniable. It wouldn’t be the first time a web hosting server has been brought down by the huge traffic burst of an article featured on Digg.

Search engines are somewhat the opposite.

A search engine will crawl and index all your worthy content sooner or later without any input on your part, you can’t however put any extra effort into directly affecting search engine results even if you wanted to.

Your place in a search engines results is ultimately deciding by the engine based on your content, the more quality content the better your result, but unlike social networking you can repeatedly promote yourself to a search engine for increased traffic.

Search engine traffic is also slow to get going. In order to help prevent spam sites continually popping up, Google has what is commonly referred to as the sandbox. The reference is symbolic of children (new websites) playing in a sandbox until they’re all grown up and ready for the big wide world.

While there’s no official word on this from Google, it is believed that the sandbox effect lasts 4 months or so, during which you won’t see much traffic search engine wise. Once your out however, search engines provide a steady stream of targeted visitors with no additional work required on your behalf.

Ultimately it’s all good. If you don’t have the time/inclination to keep up the social front, search engines will bring you visitors but there’s plenty to gain from social sites if you can utilize them.

Where do you get your traffic from?

As a point of interest I’ve included the above graphic detailing my traffic sources for the last 3 months, for me social bookmarking plays a huge roll.

At the time of writing, Stumbleupon is bringing me 45% of my visitors, Twitter brings in about 11%, Google 35% while the last 9% is made up from blog comments, lesser search engines etc. How about you?

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• A little extra pagerank seems to bring a lot of traffic (3)
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• Mistakes to avoid when launching your blog (0)

Google vs social networking

The internet is a big pond, and we all start as little fish. But swimming to the top of Google isn’t as hard as you think. EmailsFromCrazyPeople recently had an email forwarded to them with the solution.

Hello,

My name is John Smith and I run www.website.com. I am into this niche business for over 2 years and we have optimised our site well to rank for the keywords one, two & three in Google. Yesterday I saw that your site is ranking higher that us for those keywords.

But in fact what I see is that your site is useless and doesn’t have anything related to the keyword.

Can you please removed your site from Google, so that our site may go higher. Please understand this is our main business and we cannot afford to be there so the best thing will be that you remove your site from Google.

If you don’t agree to remove your site from Google for this keyword we may go to up to any extent and may sue you for this. Please don’t force us to do so.

Thanks,
John Smith

Now all I have to do is…

Write a few dozen threatening emails to other graphic designers and have them remove their sites and I’ll be number 1 on Google! Wow, I never knew it was so easy to reach the top.

First thing is to write a letter to actor Andrew Keir. Sure he was born 56 years before me but that’s no excuse for out ranking me for my own name.

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Get #1 on Google by writing an e-mail

When it comes down to it, graphic design is all about business. Crafting an image and/or message which distinguishes your brand, sells your products and achieves your goals. But what are your goals?

It wouldn’t be for the first time that a client had something designed, then a month later when business hasn’t increased 10 fold came and blamed the designer for the suddenly unsatisfactory design.

The S.M.A.R.T marketing principle dictates your goals meet the following criteria, they are;

Specific: What exactly do you want to achieve? more sales? more exposure? more web traffic?

Measurable: How will you know when you’ve reach your goal? Having it seem like a little extra business coming your way is hardly definitive. Have measures in place to accurately see your projects success ( or lack thereof ).

Achievable: There’s the old saying aim low and succeed which couldn’t be more true. On the flip side of that coin, setting fantasy goals you’re unlikely to achieve is going to somewhat defeat the purpose of the exercise.

Realistic: O.k. So this is much the same as achievable, but this wouldn’t be an acronym without it.

Timely: The problem with setting a rough finish line is you will never reach it. If your happy to have something finished in about 6 months time you’ll be just as content with it taking 7 months. Then 8, then 9, 10, 12, 18, then your so far past your deadline you’ve accomplished nothing.

So what are your goals?

Have you recently begun or finish a project of some kind? How successful was it and how do you know? Image credit.

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Setting S.M.A.R.T goals

InstantShift recently posted 88 single web page designs for a little design inspiration. Single page websites are great if your don’t have a lot of content and often used to showcase a portfolio of work with great effect.

They also free you from a lot of restrictions as a design only has to function on a single page but herein lies a problem. From a search engine point of view you essentially have zero content.

If your site is merely a point of reference and your business or traffic is derived from elsewhere this isn’t a problem but if you plan to promote your business primarily through your website this strikes me as quite a disadvantage.

Compare this to a content management system like a wordpress blog. A website is a long term investment, over a year a blogger with the time and inclination posting 2-3 posts a week can quite comfortably amass over 100 posts related to their particular niche.

That’s 100 more pages of content covering multiple topics, hundreds more keywords and phrases and possibly most important 100 more opportunities for backlinks.

What are your thoughts?

There’s no denying that single page sites can look great, be sure to check out that link. And blogging isn’t for everyone, without some regularity of new content there is little point in having one.

Ultimately the purpose and content of your website will dictate which path you take, but choosing a single page website design could be a disadvantage.

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The SEO problem with single page website designs

Monetizing your blog can be a little tricky. Most themes are designed around content and navigation rather than advertisements, and with Googles limited range of available Adsense sizes, things don’t always go together perfectly.

If your looking to monetize your WordPress blog, here are 10 Adsense ready wordpress themes to get you started. There are a variety of ad placement locations depending on your style, everything from 125×125 pixels boxes to 728×90 pixel leaderboards.

First up, DarkZen, a simple, clean and minimalist design.

Connections by Vanilla Mist.

BlueSensation is a clean theme with a traditional look: large content column on the left and a single sidebar, ready to display 125×125 ads.

Monetizing the web’s MW theme.

Decker comes with a 300×250 AdSense unit integrated. All you will need to do is to copy and paste your AdSense code on the advertisement.php file.

Prosense by Dosh Dosh. This blog run by Maki is dedicated to online marketing and has tonnes of useful information on the subject if your looking to further your knowledge.

Deep Blue includes a 336×280 Adsense unit on top of the sidebar, Googles best performing ad unit.

Passion duo comes with a 468×60 banner spot on the header, and 6 125×125 spots on top of the sidebar.

Studiopress comes with three units integrated already. A 468×60 unit on top, a 336×280 unit on top of the sidebar and a 120×600 unit on the bottom of the sidebar.

A quick note…

Now you’ve got range of themes to choose from, an important thing to consider is when to monetize your blog. As tempting as it might be start advertising a.s.a.p. you probably want to put it off until you’ve got a decent amount of content.

Nothing will put your visitors off more than a website full of ads and no information.

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Google Adsense ready WordPress themes