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Can Twitter Help my Business?

I have been using Twitter on a regular basis for nearly 7 months now, the results of my experiment started back in April are ready to be published! In that time I have tweeted 315 times and amassed 343 followers and followed 442 tweeters. Not huge numbers but I belong to the quality vs quantity school of thought.

Here are the questions I asked myself at the start

  1. This is the big one. Can I use twitter to secure new projects?
    Too good to be true. The answer is no… not yet anyway
  2. Can Tweeting increase the traffic to my website?
    I have promoted every new blog post using www.bit.ly to shorten URL’s and track click though rates. I have seen a definite increase in traffic to my blog, so the answer is YES! More traffic is a good thing.
    A client of mine recently experienced the viral nature of Twitter with an enormous spike of hits to their site. It was due to a British actor picking up on a blog post they had written and tweeting about it.
  3. What other ways can I use Twitter to help my business?
    Twitter has been a useful tool for trouble shooting. I have had questions quickly answered on problems I was having with Quickbooks and a Dreamweaver quirk. Tweets pertaining to problems really benefit from using # tags e.g #dreamweaver or #HTML.

All in all it has been a successful experiment and I will continue to use Twitter. Be warned though, if you tweet about the weather, what you are eating for lunch, or start tweeting philosophical quotes, I am very likely to “unfollow”. If you are interested in following me click stlwebdesign

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Free Credits for istockphoto

Here is a great tip if you are looking for free credits for iStockphoto.com

I regularly use them to source images for web and graphic design projects. They have a wealth of very reasonable priced images which is always popular with my clients. The cost of stock photography can really rocket if you are not looking in the right places.

Their stock is priced in terms of credits and they offer three options to purchase these credits via “pay as you go”, subscriptions or via a corporate account. Pay as you go works well for me.

However there is also a way to earn free credits. If you have incorporated some istockphoto stock into a project you can submit it via the Designers Spotlight page, you do need to be a member but membership is free. Every piece goes through an approval process but if it is approved it gets added to the new projects album and you are awards five free credits.

Don’t you love free stuff!

View My Portfolio

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Generate revenue from your websites: AdSense

Looking for an easy way to make some additional revenue from your web site? Try Google AdSense.

A small snippet of code placed on your web site will generate Goggle ads earning you revenue based on a cost per click or cost per impression basis. You can fine tune the look and feel of the ads to compliment your site, have control over the size and shape and even block competitors ads from appearing on your pages. It is completely FREE .

Is Adsense right for your website? Here are a few things to consider

  • What levels of traffic does your site experience? Sites with a high volume of traffic will bring in more revenue.

  • Does your site rank highly for any popular keywords or phrases? Our site on counterfeit detection ranks very highly for the key phrase “counterfeit detection”. Due to the popularity of this phrase there are plenty of Google advertisers bidding on this phrase for the display of their adverts and hence no shortage of ads to display on the site.

  • Are you comfortable having advertisements on your site? Despite the high traffic and favorable key phrase ranking Indigo Image gets, we are not comfortable having Google Ads featured on our site. They could offer our visitors a reason to leave and explore the services offered by another web design/ graphics arts company. It is possible to block competitors sites but blocking all advertisers bidding on a generic key phrase, e.g. in our case something like logo design, is not feasible.

  • Do you have a suitable area on your site to display ads? To get the most out of the ads they need to be placed in a prominent place. Does the design of your site accommodate this?

I have a couple of personal site with pretty high traffic and excellent rankings on the search engines that are a perfect platform to display Google ads. The ads were configured to compliment their color schemes and feature prominently at the top of each site without being too intrusive. They provide a steady stream of revenue.

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Website Copyright Infringement : An update.

copyright
I recently wrote a post titled ” Has your website content been stolen” after a client discovered another website owner was using her copy. I did a quick check on Indigo Image, using the tools I described in my post, and found that not one but two two web design companies were using chunks of my copy.

I contacted both companies and pointed out my areas of concern asking them to change their copy. After two days I hadn’t heard back from either it seemed they were both taking the “lets bury my head in the sand approach and hope this goes away”. I contacted their hosting companies and made a copyright infringement complaint. Both companies, Bravenet and Bluehost, took my complaint very seriously. My issues were run through their legal departments. The end result, both offending web design companies have had their sites suspended.

©Indigo Image 2009 at the bottom of each page of the web site is there for a reason. Everything from the design and copy is copyrighted material and can’t be used in any form by someone else unless they have authorization to do so.

Have you checked your web site recently? Is your web site copy being used by someone else?

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Free Vector Art Brush set for Adobe Illustrator.

During this recent project, I made good use of one of my favorite tools in Adobe Illustrator – custom brushes.

In under ten minutes I have produced this complicated graphic, simply by designing a set of custom brushes and applying them to a circle.


Here are the brushes I generated:-

They are yours for free. Download the zipped file Here

To install

  1. unzip the file
  2. Copy the file to your Illustrator > Presets > Brushes folder
  3. Restart illustrator.
  4. Illustrator>window>brush libraries>indigo_image_1

The brushes will now appear in your brush palette.

Enjoy!

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Has your website content been stolen?

Last week a client contacted me with news that she had discovered a web site that was using her web copy. It was a site offering the same type of service and operating in the same geographic area. Not good news.

I suggested she contact the site owner to point out the obvious copyright issues. After an initial acknowledgment and a promise to fix things the site owner is now refusing to make any changes.

Turning to an attorney is the next step but I have also suggested contacting the hosting company of the offending web site and making a copyright infringement complaint. I took this approach many years ago when copy and images ( even code) from this web site were taken. The hosting company suspended the infringing site very quickly which paved the way for immediate discussions and a solution.

My customer’s experience has spurred me to to a little research on our own web site today and low and behold I have discovered a web design company who have stolen huge chunks of our copy. They have been contacted and ask to amend the site and I have put in a copyright infringement complaint with their hosting provider.

Here is a list of resources that can be useful in these sort of cases.

www.whois.net
Useful for details of the domain name registrar and hosting provider

www.copyscape.com
Search for copies of your page on the web. Has a premium service

www.plagiarismchecker.com
Free service to check for plagiarism, simple enter your URL

www.archive.org
The way back machine. Useful for establishing timelines

www.google.com/dmca.html
Notify Google of the infringement – must be done via snail mail or fax