Rags To Stitches Productions: BRANDING ~ Web Design and Development

Showing posts with label BRANDING. Show all posts

Social Media Image Templates

5:20 PM Author: RAGS

As the social media landscape has grown, most of the widely used sites offer you the ability to customize your pages. This presents you with a great opportunity to promote your brand and present your business in an attractive and professional manner.

I like to keep templates on hand for customizing my own sites as well as my clients' social media presence. I personally find them useful, time saving, and when I am ready with a design, look and feel for a website launch I can easily handle the social media images during the process.

Feel free to download these templates for your own use. Or if you're in need of having some custom images created for you, contact me for a quick and easy quote!

Facebook Cover Photo Template

Google Plus Cover Template

Twitter Header Template

YouTube Cover Template

Do you have social media sharing buttons on your web site or blog?

Providing your visitors with social media sharing buttons provides them one click access for sharing your content. I can add social media sharing functionality with buttons that compliment your site for just $35.00!

Add this important feature to your site today!

Design and Install Social Sharing Functionality to One Web Site or Blog

Only $35.00!

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5 Creative Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website

6:51 PM Author: RAGS

There are many ways to direct qualified buyers to your website, and I see many website owners missing those opportunities. It seems that the simple phrase SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has either intimidated them or has them distracted from the variety of other avenues available for promoting their websites.

I recently posted some advice and suggestions in an online forum, and I received many private messages with positive feedback as a result. After reading through my post again I realized it is something I should elaborate on and share here on the blog.

1) Create and Submit iGoogle Desktop Themes

Internet users who utilize iGoogle enjoy the desktop themes, widgets and the many features that go along with it. By creating iGoogle desktop themes and branding them with your web site URL you can expose your website to thousands of Internet users. You can also put links to the themes on your web site to offer them to your customers, or those browsing and not buying that particular day.

I created a darts theme last year to promote my dart shirts web site. Currently over 2,000 people are using it (they give you a counter that stays current). I've seen the number of users as high as 4,500+ before. Considering that is just one theme and a small number of potential iGoogle users that are interested in darts, anyone with some creativity and a feel for their target audience could create themes to target any demographic.

An added bonus for the technically challenged, as I looked up the link and point you to where you can get started I discovered that Google has now added a Theme Maker feature!

2) Create Wallpapers for Computers and Cell Phones

Everyone with a computer has a desktop, and virtually all of them like to personalize it with wallpaper. The number of cell phone users in the world has now exceeded the number of people who own computers, and most cell phones these days offer personalization as well.

By creating custom wallpapers for both desktops and mobile devices and brand them with your web site URL, you can then offer them as a free download AND submit them to free wallpaper/cell phone web sites. Consider how many people would end up with www.yourwebsite.com right on their desktop and/or cell phone every day. Plus your website would get additional traffic from users searching for wallpapers and themes.

To give you a jump start on this, here are the screen resolutions you should offer:

Windows and Mac Desktops:

640x480 Screen Resolution
800x600 Screen Resolution
1024x768 Screen Resolution
1152x864 Screen Resolution
1280x960 Screen Resolution
1344x1008 Screen Resolution
1280x1024 Screen Resolution
1400x1050 Screen Resolution
1600x1200 Screen Resolution
2048x1536 Screen Resolution

Mobile Devices:

101X80 Screen Resolution
128X128 Screen Resolution
128X160 Screen Resolution
176X220 Screen Resolution
240X240 Screen Resolution
240X320 Screen Resolution
320X240 Screen Resolution
96X64 Screen Resolution

3) Create MySpace Themes

If you really want to get busy, you could create some MySpace Themes. Brand them, link them to your web site and offer them as a free download. Sooner or later your web site - with links to your web site - would be all over MySpace. In addition to the added traffic you'd get from search engines on MySpace Layouts and Themes, all those in-bound links will help your SEO efforts. To repeat my comment regarding iGoogle desktop themes above, anyone with some creativity and a feel for their target audience could create themes to target any demographic.

4) Create a Facebook Application

If you're a savvy developer you know this already. For the rest there's the built in Gift Creator application on Facebook that is as easy to use as a toaster. Using Gift Creator you can create an app that lets users share your artwork, products or anything else you decide on with their friends. This is a major viral tool. I created one in December of 2008 for my dart shirts and currently there are over 4000 daily users - all trading my dart shirts with each other - and all those pages are branded and linked to my website. That number climbs by an average of 100 users per week.

5) Create Twitter Backgrounds

Twitter is growing into quite the social networking/micro blogging experience for millions of Internet users. By creating backgrounds specific to Twitter - and the demographics you wish to target - you can brand them with your website URL and offer them as free downloads. You could even create a Twitter account to promote the backgrounds as well as link to your products on a regular basis.

I am considering buying a domain name and creating a web site just for this purpose. I think it is a great channel to dive into and take advantage of.

Now to get creative!

Consider these ideas and the ways you can put them to use to drive visitors to your web site! The comments feature is active for any questions, comments, suggestions. Tell me what's on your mind.

Where's Your Widget?

9:25 PM Author: RAGS

Back in February of 08 I had posted about the iGoogle Darts Theme I had created, and later discovered went over relatively well as a traffic generator. I recently discovered a new and similar avenue in a Widget.

Widgets are nifty little scripts that run on web pages. They can have just about anything in them. Products to shop for, a picture of the day, the joke of the week etc... I'm sure you've seen more than one since you've been online today.

Having a web site that sells dart shirts and gifts to dart players, I discovered a news Widget that would allow me to enter any RSS feed into it for adding darts news snippets to my web site. A small effort to make the site somewhat "sticky" as they like to say. While surfing through my Google Reader for an RSS feed it occurred to me that I read darts news from several sources almost daily. By using the "Share" feature in Google Reader I could customize and generate my own darts news feed.

The result is a branded darts news Widget that dart players with web sites, blogs, MySpace Profiles, league web sites and other web pages might consider installing on their web pages. I know, now you're wondering how this may generate some traffic to my web site right?

Since I am generating the RSS feed through my Google Reader account, I also subscribed to my dart shirts blog. Now every time I post an announcement for a new product or t-shirt design I can share that news along with the other news snippets I share for the day. As a result, that simple click of the share button will broadcast my blog post to every web site using the Widget. And much like the iGoogle darts theme, this Widget will more than likely be placed on darts related web sites, where dart players can be found surfing the web.

I hope to update on some statistical data in the near future, in the meantime don't be shy. You can look at my Widget (yes, that does make me giggle), then browse around the Widgetbox web site and think creatively about making one of your own!

iGoogle Darts Theme

8:57 PM Author: RAGS

Just like most things I seem to stumble across, iGoogle had no home page themes for darts. So, just like the screen savers I made for my phone, PDA, Blackberry and laptop I decided that needed to be addressed and submitted a darts theme. Also, being the Internet Marketing tool that I am, I branded it with my dart shirts web site URL. My vision of course was to draw dart players to the web site to shop.

Can I say it was successful as an Internet Marketing venture? Unfortunately, the nature of the theme limits you to providing a static image. So without a functional link to track statistics from users there is no way to tell.

The theme page does have a counter that shows how many users currently have the theme installed on their iGoogle home page, and I have seen it as high as 4000 users since submitting the theme. From a branding perspective, considering a few thousand Internet users have my web site URL on their screen I would venture to say many will visit the web site. I would also guess that the majority of users who are enjoying the theme are dart players, which is a slam dunk in terms of reaching a targeted, qualified audience.

This is just another example of finding creative ways to get exposure and traffic - especially qualified traffic - to your web site. The Internet is full of widgets, bells, whistles and inter active features that people use quite often, and if you keep your eyes peeled for ways to market yourself through them you can discover stones left unturned.

So, if you're a dart player please enjoy this iGoogle Darts Theme and drop some comments - good or bad - on the iGoogle theme page!

During the day it looks like this: