If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You may also sign up my blog tips newsletter, and be the first to know.Thanks for visiting!

Money, money and money… Whenever we want to do something big, we always think it’s going to cost us a fortune. So, we dig a grave to bury our dreams without ever thinking about doing some research that whether our dreams of making our small business a huge success is possible in limited budget or not.

One thing that causes small businesses to fail is that small businesses don’t work on creating their corporate identity. Without creating a top quality logo, you can’t build your business image and, hence, your marketing efforts will only waste your time and money.

Corporate Identity, Social Media and Graphic Design are Connected:

Your logo design helps you create your identity. When you use online social media to promote your business, your campaigns won’t be effective without an attractive logo.

Yes, your logo design plays an important role in giving your business a credible look. If it’s not attractive, your business won’t look attractive. As social media is a free way of promoting your business globally, you still won’t get much benefit.

Secondly, even if you manage to drive traffic to your site through your social media campaigns, you will only enjoy high conversion if your website design is attractive and professional.

Hence, corporate identity, social media and your website or graphic design are connected and they all work together to make your business successful.

Let’s Talk About Them in Detail:

Corporate Identity:

To create your corporate identity in a professional way, you need a professionally designed logo. In order to understand the importance of this small piece of design, let’s look at all big brands. For example: Nike, Toyota, Target, Adidas, etc. They all have a logo and these businesses are easily recognized by their logos.

Luckily, in today’s tough competition, custom logo design prices are not high. You can now get a top quality logo at a fraction of the cost.

Long gone are the days when logos cost thousands of dollars.

So, before you start promoting your business, go ahead and get a top quality custom logo design to represent your business professionally worldwide.

Social Media:

After creating your corporate identity, you may start your marketing campaigns. Today, online social media is a powerful way of promoting your business. When you create your accounts on different sites, you can display your logo design on all different pages. This way, your market will begin to know about your business and recognize your logo.

If your logo design is of low-quality, the chances are, you will be perceived as a low-quality business and people won’t take much interest in you. So, start marketing on social media after you create your corporate identity in an effective way.

Graphic Design:

Now, it’s time you drive traffic to your site from social media. However, you won’t enjoy a good conversion rate if the graphic design of your website is not attractive. So, this is something you need to work on. Make sure your website looks attractive and your logo is prominent on all pages.

Just like logos, getting your website designed is not expensive these days. When you pay to create an attractive website, think of your payment as an investment which will eventually pay off and help you increase your sales and grow your business.

The bottom line is… Uncle Sam never told us that Corporate Identity, Social Media and Graphic Design work together to make your business a huge success. The best part is… You can achieve success even if your budget is limited.

This is a guest post by Ben Johnson from logoinn.com

Every now and then I test and review valuable ad networks for bloggers. Conridium is yet another one. It is especially suitable for gaming/entertainment bloggers. If you are blogging about games and entertainment you can make some extra income by joining this ad network.

Conridium is a CPA ad network which pays publishers for generating sign-ups for the most popular free multiplayer games online. They have the great offers and you can’t complain about the payouts. They are a gaming ad network that started a while ago and not to many people know about them.

You can get around 30% conversion on the clicks and around 65% conversions from your gaming site. Conridium was not so hard of a network to get approved. As a publisher you get paid for every sign up you bring them. From my experience they pay pretty well. They offer revenue shares with their publishers, and it varies depending on your site.

They have a great publisher relations guy. He is really responsive and always is happy to answer any of my question and concerns. One thing I learned as a publisher you can not have incentivized leads with them. Once you have created your account, you would need to submit your website details for approval before the ad code is provided to you. Personally, I would recommend that you put your best site forward [in terms of traffic]  and a site in the entertainment/gaming niche would have more chances of approval.

As a publisher you will have various banner ad options; leader board, half banner, sky scraper,The most effective ad size is their new Editorial links. the links are way more effective but you have to ask them so they can get you editorials.

On my account I am generating an average of 50-1.50 per sign-up, I have not seen any network so far in the gaming industry with this high of payouts for signing up for a free game. They pay via Paypal or Check, subject to a $100.00 USD minimum balance.

Conridium’s minimum requirement is 50,000 unique visitors a month, entrainment/gaming content. Though from my experience MMO/RPG web sites do the best job for them.

Over all Conridum is pretty good addition to any earning strategy, and depending on how you place your ads , may end up giving your monthly revenues a real boost! Highly recommended for anyone in the gaming niche.

You can find more details at their website: www.conridium.com

We’ve all been there.  Sitting in front of a blank page, blank screen, or basically any blank space that needs to be filled with fodder from your brain.  And yet, you just can’t seem to form the words that will culminate in a cohesive whole.  You struggle to put together some kind of sensible sentence, but all you get is gobbledygook that belongs in a Tim Burton/Johnny Depp vehicle, not in your serious writing.

Most of us refer to this horrible phenomena as writer’s block, but there is an especially heinous permutation of this syndrome known as Blogger’s Block.  Why is this worse for bloggers than other literary types?  Two reasons: first, most bloggers are called upon to write continuously, and let’s face it, sometimes you just ain’t got the juice, and second, if you write a blog, it may be a source of income, which you definitely can’t lose due to a battle with your brain.

So how do you combat this most deadly of writing diseases?  Good news.  There are several solutions.

One good way to start is by taking a break.  Yeah, you’re on a deadline, but psyching yourself out isn’t going to do you any good, so go think about something else for a while.  Watch some TV, listen to a little Led Zep, or read a magazine.  The logic behind this is two-fold.  Often, if you go away from a problem for a while, the answer will *magically* come to you (this is not actuallly magic, it’s simply your brain clearing the clutter).  In addition, focusing on something else may spark an idea.  It’s not uncommon to find inspiration in another source of inventive media.  Your brain is apt to look for connections in any sensory input, so fill up on that creative Kool-Aid!

Another trick that many writers swear by is…drum roll, please…writing!  Yes, the best way to get your gray matter on the think-train to literary-land is to start the ball rolling.  Try some descriptive writing about the things around you (…the curtains billowed lazily in the sweltering heat of the late August afternoon…).  Or if you’re really having trouble, tap into an online source like www.creativewritingprompts.com.  Old school writers bought books, but today we do it much faster.  Find topics like “If I were to barter my brain…” and beginning lines like, “She knew it wasn’t any of her business but Catherine couldn’t help wondering what Wade was up to.”  Is Catherine looking for love or is Wade getting taller at an alarming rate?  Only you can tell.  The point is, just getting into the right mindset can reboot your brain and get you back on track.  Another good source is www.theteacherscorner.net/daily-writing-prompts/.

So if you find yourself giving your monitor the thousand-mile stare and every time you look at the clock only eight seconds have gone by (rather than the thirty minutes it felt like), give yourself a break and go for some inspiration.  There are worse things than getting a little boost for your creative genius (like for example, missing a deadline).

Guest post by Sarah Harris, of Zen College Life, the premier directory for online schools. Find out more information about criminal justice degrees.

Back in Nov 2009 I posted Chitika + Adsense Ad Placement Guide. Chitika is still my 2nd largest make money online revenue stream. Since Nov 2009 my Chitika income increased significantly in parallel to the increase in the number of referrals and blog posts. The best is yet to come. Today I would like to share a very good news about Chitika.  I am very excited to let you know that Chitika is expanding their ad display to show to more than just your search traffic! What this means to you? Your Chitika ads will now show to some of your non-search traffic so you can generate more revenue. Great, isn’t it?

The new ads are called Chitika Select. Using their click-prediction technology, Chitika will display Select ads on your blog when there is a higher chance the ad will be clicked.

How will this affect your revenue/stats?

Whenever Select ads are displayed on your blog it will result in more impressions to your Chitika ads automatically. The more impressions to your Chitika ads, the higher revenue. Chitika estimates Select ads could give bloggers a 5 – 10% revenue increase on top of Premium alone. Not so bad, huh?

The good thing is, you do not have to make any changes to your Chitka ads; this will happen automatically starting Monday, March 8th, 2010. Excellent news!

You might have some questions about the new ads. Bearing this in mind, I copied FAQ section from the official announcement for your easy guidance:

Can I Still Use Chitika | Select With Google AdSense?

Yes! Just like the Chitika | Premium ads you can use the new Chitika | Select ads and AdSense together on the same page.

How Can I Upgrade My Chitika | Premium Ads?

You don’t need to, it will happen automatically Monday, March 8th 2010.

Are Chitika | Select Ads PPC (Pay-Per-Click)?

Chitika | Select will always show the highest-paying ads possible. This will include PPC ads as well as CPM image/banner ads (which pay per impression, whether a user clicks or not).

Will Chitika | Select Ads look different than Chitika | Premium?

Sometimes. Similar to how Google shows image/banner ads if they determine that it is the highest paying ad for a certain user visiting the site, we will do the same. Some of your users will see ads with the Chitika | Premium format and others will see ads that look different but will pay more.

It’s been a few months since I last posted on my blog. That period was a bit hectic for me; I established my own company Stradiji.  Basically we provide SEO, Social Media, and Business Blogging services. I will later address it in a seperate issue. I would like to talk about meta descriptions and their increasing importance in 2010.

What Is a Meta Description?

It is the text snippets of the webpage you see in search results. They used to be an important ranking factor until 2009. In 2009 both Google and Yahoo! officially announced they no longer used Meta-descriptions in their search algorithms. However, recent developments in Google’s search algorithm bring Meta description back to life as an important ranking factor.

Google did not make an announcement about the Meta descriptions. However your site’s meta description can now significantly affect your rankings. I will explain how it happens.

How Can Meta Descriptions Affect Your Rankings Again?

In Jan 2010 Google announced that they would be tailoring everyone’s search results based on their search history whether users are signed into Google or not. Actually Google has been customizing peoples SERPs (search engine results pages) for quite a while already, but until this year it only happened when you searched while signed into your Google account. This year, signed in or not everybody gets personal results.

Whether you’re signed in or not into Google account, all the searches you run on Google are stored in your browser cookies. This data is called  ‘Web History’ and Google uses it to customize your search results. If you’re not signed in, your Web History is stored for 180 days, then old data is deleted and replaced with new searches. If you’re signed in, there’s no time limit and you can easily manage your Web History.  The thing is either way the searches you run and sites you visit will affect your future search experience.

The sites you visit more often will be ranked higher in the search results on related queries. For example if you search for ‘problogger’ and visit www.searchforblogging.com. Next time when you search for ‘problogger’ you may see www.searchforblogging.com in top 10 results even if it doesn’t rank there in the general impersonalized search.

Although Meta descriptions are no longer part of the ranking algorithm they can significantly affect your site’s positions in the personalized search results. Your Meta description is a crucial factor that determines the CTR (click-through-rate) of your site in search results. The more compelling your description is, the more searchers will click it. When they click through to your site from search results this is recorded in their Web History. Next time they search for a product or service related to your site, it may appear high up in their personalized search results. Got it?

What Should You Do?

You should keep in mind that Google does not always show the Meta description you provide. Sometimes it just brings a random text snippet from your page that contains the keywords used in the query. But you can easily locate the keywords where your Meta description shows up by searching for them on Google.

All you need is to take a look at your Meta descriptions. Check and see how your website appears in the search results and find ways to improve it.  Having a compelling text in your search results snippet will get you more clicks, more visitors and eventually more customers.