Graphic Design

Weekly Links Roundup – Ashburn VA, Adobe Apps, Forms, Remarketing

January 25, 2019 by Debbie Campbell

The top website and online marketing links of the week.

Ever noticed, if you’re like most Google Analytics users, how much traffic you get from Ashburn, VA? Turns out Ashburn is a big technology center – 70% of the world’s Internet traffic flows through there; about 2.2 trillion Google searches per day.

Adobe’s app subscriptions are undeniably expensive. Photoshop by itself is $33.99/mo for businesses (right now). The first time I bought Photoshop it was in a box with a bunch of other Creative Suite apps for around $600. But anyway, there are alternatives for everything. Here’s a post on 27 free alternatives to Adobe subscription apps. I can also recommend the Affinity products – not free, but solid photo and illustration tools at a low cost.

Here is an interesting post on how form length affects conversions – and it’s not just form length that can have a negative impact. Sometimes longer forms do better, it all depends on a mix of factors.

You’ve probably heard about remarketing (if you’re not using it already) – but you may not be so sure what it is. This is a great intro – learn how to get started with remarketing using Google Ads and Facebook. Basically, remarketing is like getting a second chance to connect to potential customers who already know who you are, such as people who visited your site but didn’t make a conversion.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Better Signup Forms, SEO Plugins, 2019 Holidays, Logo Trends

January 4, 2019 by Debbie Campbell

The top website and online marketing links of the week.

First post of 2019!

Let’s begin with something that affects most business websites – signup forms. Read about 12 tips for creating better signup forms for your site, including:

How many fields to include;
Whether to offer some kind of incentive for signing up;
How to prevent spam without using a traditional, hard-to-read Captcha.

Next… As a new-ish user of the Genesis Framework, I was interested to see this smackdown between Genesis SEO and Yoast SEO, two of the top SEO solutions for WordPress. I must admit I’m a Yoast fan, but still, this is worth a read if you’re the user of a Genesis theme.

Constant Contact, the email marketing folks with an office right down the street in Loveland, CO, say that January is a great time to start your 2019 marketing and holiday planning. Check out their infographic for January 2019.

Finally… If you’re thinking of a re-branding this year – updating your business logo, for example – you’ll want to take a look at this review of logo design and branding trends for 2019.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – WordPress Performance, Marketing Plan, Text on Images, Email Lists

March 23, 2018 by Debbie Campbell

The top website and marketing links of the week.

WordPress performance can be a hard thing to get your head around – there are a lot of factors that play into page loading time. If you’re willing to try to tackle a slow-loading site on your own, this checklist of 19 ways to speed up WordPress may help.

Are you a freelancer or solo entrepreneur? If you are, you have to be your own marketing team (as well as wearing every other hat) and mastering your marketing may seem like an impossibility. Here’s a nice post that describes a simple, effective inbound marketing plan for solo business owners that might be just what you need.

Earlier this week I was Googling for ideas on text overlays for hero images and found this post which might help you too if you’re creating your own graphics.

Finally… email marketing still provides one of the highest ROI (return on investment) for any marketing method. If you don’t have an email list, it’s time to start one! Here’s info on why with email lists, bigger is better.