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

After having seen the great interest to my ebook series Become A Problogger, I decided to create a Facebook group where I can share my experiences in problogging with the start up and established bloggers.

No worries, I won’t be sending you notification mails via the group. I want to share my knowledge and expertise from make money with blogs to social media, and at the same time learn from your experience. I truly believe that knowledge grows when it is shared. Join the Become A Problogger Facebook group, and let’s start a fruitful discussion.

I joined HubSpot webinar, “How to Combine SEO, Blogging, and Social Media for Results”, held on December 17, 2008. I reviewed the webinar for my busy readers. This is part 1 and it covers SEO and blogging only. I will mention social media in part 2.

Inbound Marketing: SEO + Blogs + Social Media

The webinar is hosted by Mike Volpe from HubSpot. Mike started the webinar with the comparison of outbound marketing (old media platforms like TV, newspapers, etc.) and inbound marketing (SEO, blogging, social media, etc.)

Inbound marketing is based on permission, whereas outbound marketing strategy is based on interruption. Who likes the commercial breaks during the TV series or shows? We don’t like them at all.

Inbound marketing is also a good strategy for bloggers. You should not interrupt your readers with so many affiliate marketing links or sales banners.

Add value, build trust, create a community, get their permission first before trying to sell your readers something. This is my definition for inbound marketing for bloggers.

Key Ingredients of Inbound Marketing for Bloggers

• SEO / SEM
• Social Media
• Blogging
• RSS
• Public Relations
• Free tools/trials

Don’t worry if you don’t have so much money to spend for your blog. We are living in the era of innovation and creativity. You can use above mentioned tools, and create miracles. You can compete with any company, even if you don’t have the same budget. If you dedicate yourself and spend the time as efficient as possible, a good inbound marketing strategy can bring you to over the top.

What Determines Success?

• Blog Content (subscribers or fans, inbound links)
• Social Media (fans or friends, content)
• SEO (content, inbound links)

A good inbound marketing strategy can bring your blog a lot of visitors. If you do it correctly, chances are there will be an exponential growth in your traffic. If you blog regularly, and apply some SEO techniques your posts will be better indexed and ranked in search engines. In other words you will have more visitors. If you effectively use social media tools at the same time, then your visitors will reach more than you can imagine.

The next question: What to Publish?

You should fully use the advantages of all possible publishing alternatives:

• Blog
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Photos
• Presentations
• eBooks
• News Releases

Don’t be shy, capture a two minutes video and help your readers solve a problem. Upload it to video sites like YouTube, and see how many people will be viewing. Do this regularly, and follow your blog stats. Even the photos you captured with your digital camera can bring your blog a log of visitors. Upload them to Flickr. Spend a few hours everyday starting from this week to write your ebook. An ebook has viral affect, and you will never know how easily it will spread around the blogosphere. Write a press release for your blog and submit it to tons of free online press release services. Spend some time and create a presentation for your blog. Share it using SlideShare. Create podcasts by interviewing popular bloggers.

Where To Publish?

I created below list for your easy guidance:

• Photos : Flickr, Photobucket
• Short updates : Twitter
• Presentations: SlideShare
• Videos: YouTube, Google Video, Tube Mogul, blip.tv, Viddler
• Podcasts : Podcast.com

The Biggest Blogging Mistake

According to Mike, the biggest blogging mistake is using a free URL from TypePad or Blogger. I certainly agree with this. You should use a self-hosted WordPress blog if you are serious about blogging. You may read one of my old posts, Blogging Wars – WordPress Vs Blogger, for a good comparison of Blogger and WordPress.

SEO and Blog Frequency

Mike mentioned the importance of SEO for blogs. You shall read my post series The 5 Basic Steps Of SEO For Your Blog – Part 4 to learn some basic SEO tricks for blogs.

The only thing I did not agree with Mike during the entire webinar was the blog posting frequency. He says if you have a SEO focused blog, frequency is less important. Sorry Mike, but Google bots are frequently visiting the blogs that have one or two posts a day. So frequency is still important even if you have a 100% SEO friendly blog. Look at Darren Rowse from Problogger.net, he posts at least two posts every single day.

Assume that with every blog post you are putting another brick in the wall. You are building your empire. Type “site:www.searchforblogging.com” and see my blog’s indexing rate in Google. Do the same for your own, and see your blog’s indexing rate. If the results are less than 1000, then you need to post more, and focus on tagging. For some tips on tagging, take a look at The 5 Basic Steps Of SEO For Your Blog – Part 1

Blog Topic Ideas

• List of 5 ideas, trends, or thoughts: List articles are easy to write and read, if you have enough experience.
• Publish a list of links: If your brain is stuck, take a look at your Google Reader, and find the most interesting blog titles. Read them and if you feel like they will give value to your readers, make a post with a few sentences introduction to those blog posts.
• You may share an experience: This could be easy if you regularly try products or tools related to your blog topic.
• Comment on other blog articles: Collect all your comments to other blogs in a document. These comments can easily turn into blog posts.
• Check your email outbox: When you reply a blogging related email, you write a summary for a good blog post at the same time. Check your email outque, there are a lot of good blog topics are waiting for you.

The presentation video is online at http://www.hubspot.com/archive/sbsm-webinar. You may download or view the slides on the same page, as well as access the additional resources we mentioned during the presentation.

Part 2 – Social Media will be ready this weekend. Make sure you are subscribed to Search For Blogging RSS feeds so that you don’t miss any updates.

• How SEO, social media and blogging can work together for exponential results
• How to spend your time on each Internet marketing activity
• Case studies of successful implementations

Time: 1 PM EST (or GMT-5) and duration is an hour. You may register for the free webinar now. Even if you can’t make the live event, they will email you a link with the slides and video.

I have already signed up. I am going to join the webinar, and review it for my readers. Stay tuned…