The ideal situation for someone who is making a postcard is to have people attaching it to their fridge doors. So, how do you go about making a post card that is worthy of the refrigerator? Here are some tips to help you achieve this goal.

Clean design and bright colors

Before your post card can be considered fridge worthy, you have to make sure that it is not thrown away. When someone receives a blank postcard in the mail, the first thing they do is quickly assess it. If they do not immediately like what they see, there is a good chance that they are going to throw it away. If you have images, which take too long to properly focus on, and recognize, your post card is unlikely to pass this first test. Using bright colors and easily recognizable images is a great way to get someone to hold on to your post card.

Philosophy and Humour

If you have successfully passed the first test, and someone has decided to keep your post card, you have to make sure to keep their attention. At a first glance, people like something, which is attractive immediately, but then they like to find something that is a little deeper upon further inspection. If someone has decided to focus their attention on your post card, reward them. Include an interested fact or quote. Add a funny joke or some type of trivia question for them to look at. Your goal is to get a positive reaction out of the person who is looking at your post card. This will help them to engage with it on a higher level, and hopefully, convince them to send it to a friend.

Think laterally

If you have made a postcard that draws people’s attention, you should try to give them something unique to think about or look at. Try out different sizes, shapes, cut outs, or content until you find something that is unique. People like to be challenged and presented with new things. If you can make something that most people will have never seen before, it is likely that your postcard will be used, and more people will read your message. This is the ideal goal of creating a postcard for advertising.

Do not over sell

If you are making a simple postcard, you cannot include too much information. You do not need to include all of the features of your product. You just want people to look at your brand and understand what you primarily do. Make sure that you minimize your sales pitch, or save it for the back section of your postcard.

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Remember What Logos Are

Often, when people are choosing a logo, they forget exactly what a logo should be. If you are just selecting the first logo for your company, you might not have much experience, and might not know what a logo is. You are not stupid because of this, and you should not feel uncertain because you do not know. There are many people in the design industry who do not fully know. Here are some things that describe a logo.

A logo is basically a design

A logo should allow people to recognize your brand at a glance, they should build trust with customers, they should make people like your brand, and they should help to build loyalty with your customers.

Logos are important, but they are just a part of your overall brand.

A logo should help to set a company apart from their competitors.

Now that you know what makes a logo, here are some things, which your logo should not be.

Photographs

You might have a certain photograph, which you use for your brand. For example, if you have a landscaping company, you might have a photograph of a nice landscape that you have created; you might use it as your logo. However, you have to remember that a logo should be easy to identify, and a photograph takes too long for people to recognize. Your goal with a logo is to make instant recognition, and it is best to use something that is simpler than photography. It is also very hard to scale a photograph up to a larger format.

Clip art as a logo

Your logo should not be made using clip art. When you open your logo in an image editor, and you zoom in, you should not see lots of tiny square pixels. If you make your logo larger or smaller, it should always be viewed in the same way. A good logo should be made as a vector, so that it can be easily rescaled without losing any information.

Logos and story telling

Your logo does not have to tell the story of your entire business. It simply has to be representative of your brand. For example, think about the McDonald’s logo. It does not explain that they have some of the cheapest burgers in the world, but everyone still knows that they do. Sure, your logo should be relevant to your company, but it does not have to describe what your company is all about. It simply has to be something that people can easily recognize and associate with your business. You have support material for your brand, which can give people all of the details, so you can afford to have a simple logo that just tells people, in general, what your company primarily does.

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Once you have established a strong brand, your personal creations and work will be recognized and you can work on promoting your personal brand by producing good work. Your brand will allow you to interact with powerful social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Squidoo to further enhance your professional possibilities.

Brands are usually associated with individual ventures or freelance professionals who are simply promoting their own business and are in no conflict with other brands. While someone who works for a company and has as strong personal brand to promote his or her expertise can present a difficult issue to tackle, as the brand must not be in conflict with their company’s brand. Many companies may feel that because you have your personal brand you are in competition with the company you work with. This is why it is important to make your brand function clear, so as to keep your employer’s mind at rest.

This can be done by making clear that you are not trying to promote your brand to overstep your company, and show your employer that you are using your personal brand to help promote the company and that wherever your brand is published so is the company’s name.

You should also keep up with all events and meetings that can provide extra professional input and new opportunities for innovative ideas and information sources. You can act both as leader in these meetings and a spectator, as they provide a great source of learning and development for career advancement. All the information you gather from these meetings and conferences should be shared with your company colleagues as doing so will help avoid any sentiments of jealousy that may develop within your company and will also provide you with a mentor status.

You can provide information by specifying the different techniques and ideas you have learned by attending a meeting or conference, which includes talking about the various topics that where covered and how this can be implemented as a team within the company. You may also share your experience with your colleagues by stressing how important these meetings and community conferences are for all those within your company, which will surely interest quite a few.

Having your superiors agree to you going out and attending various public meetings and event while representing your company also needs to be solved. You can do this by convincing them how important it is for a company to engage in public meetings as it will boost the company’s image and keep them up to date with trends within their market niche.

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This coming soon page is extremely important and should not be underestimated. To develop effective teaser pages that will have an impact on users, four elements have to be covered when creating these pages: how much people will remember, how attracted they are to the pages, how much information has been passed on and the ability to collect data.

The coming soon page or teaser is now becoming popular on most websites, and there is of course a valuable reason for this. It takes time and effort to create one, but this is necessary if you wish to pave the way for a successful launching of a website before it appears online. Users will interact more willingly with the website when it does come out if they have had time to get to know it beforehand.  By providing teasers you are also creating an aura of anticipation, leaving readers eager to find out how the end product will be. We all like to be first to know about something even before it is out in public, and this is the strategy teaser pages use to increase their audience.

The first issue to consider is to create an identity that will have an impact on your teaser page. This will have relevance with issues that relate to a product, be it the logo, style, colors anything that will produce a strong brand, which will remain etched in the users’ minds. A gimmick is a good way to be remembered, that is to create something that people have never seen before. Animation works well as a gimmick on a teaser page, while it could risk disturbing users on the main website.

Viral mechanisms in the pre-registration process are a new form in the development of the “coming soon” page. This is where users get personalized links to the teaser pages, allowing the website to be launched sooner according to the number of people who sign up. You can effectively have readers share your teaser pages not only by allotting them a privileged position but also by giving them something in return. This can be under the form of credits or other alluring promotional gifts.

Another trick is to make readers really want to see the final website. Although the teaser page does not allow for much space in which to talk about the product or service, it is important you make people feel they really want to know more about it. If your teaser uses well designed features to promote the coming product, people will naturally assume that the finished product will be good too.

Although a “coming soon” page is an important part of the pre-launch campaign, there are other issues to consider for the ultimate success. These include a Facebook page, Twitter account, blog amongst other possibilities. These options will allow users to react and leave comments and provide you with essential feedback that will help you improve your marketing strategy.

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When using a search engine, results are likely what lead us back to using the same one over and over again. However, have you ever stopped to think about the usability of these top search engines web pages? Chances are you have not.

There are hundreds of millions of people that use Bing and Google every single day. Think about how much time can be saved if the sites took the time to tweak a few of the usability options. These little changes can lead to higher satisfaction and a better experience with the site overall.

The test that is outlined below will take into account how both Bing and Google stack up against each other when it comes to usability. You can then take this information and use it for your own web page. Learn how you can create a better-designed page that is easy for your customers to use.

The Test

This test is designed to be fair, with half of the people being directed to Bing’s home page screen shots and the other half going to Google. The test consists of seven questions that are simple and easy to answer.

Each person that takes the test will be shown a homepage of one of the search engine giants. They will read the question and click on the area in which they think they can find this information. The site will keep track of the time it takes you to answer the question and will generate a heat map of where everyone who takes the test clicks. These results will reflect the time it takes users to navigate the site to find the information they are looking for.

Processing the Data

The questions that are asked are simple, yet give important information about the site and how easy it is to navigate. You can view the results at http://video.intuitionhq.com/pub/405.

1.    Where do you click to search for a topic?

For the first question, Google users were faster, but they often did not click in the right place. For this reason, the point goes to Bing.

2.    Click on the area you would use to view maps

The second question results in a virtual tie.

3.    How do you navigate to the New Zealand site?

The third question goes to Bing, with the speed of the users on their site beating Google users by two seconds.

4.    If you have an email account with this provider, how do you access it?

The fourth question is a definite win for Google, with the users almost four seconds faster.
5.    What part of the screen attracts your attention the most?

When it comes to the page design, most of the people on Google’s page said the word Google was the most attractive and on Bing, many people chose the crop circles.

6.    Where would you click to learn about advertising with this provider?

If you are looking to get your brand out there, Google is the clear winner.

7.    How do you sign in on this site?

Signing in on both pages ends up in a tie that is to close to call.

Overall, Google is slightly better than Bing is, but not much. This is rather surprising considering that Google has been around for much longer. While both sites can use some minor tweaking, they are both very streamlined and user friendly.

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This is why you should proceed carefully and choose the right social media that will best promote your brand. Choose two or three that are suitable to your business niche and then start the registration process. The top three for many business or private concerns are LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Although these social networks involve different public trends, they do have a common trait. They can make your brand a success.

LinkedIn is a social network which encompasses a more professional networking public. Through LinkedIn you will no doubt find some important business relationships. Twitter, in contrast is a more laid back social network where people make friends, share interests and enjoy a general social contact. The advantage with Twitter is the response time, which is immediate. Facebook is the social network. The benefit Facebook offers is that you can generate your own profile page, create groups and make contact with possible clients or frequent customers. It is an excellent way to interact and generate new business-related connections.

It is essential the information you provide on these networks, is the same for all of them. If potential customers and users find different information on the various social networks, your brand will be considered unreliable. This will also help your brand to be easily recognizable.

When creating an account, make sure you have a good profile picture or a professional brand logo that has a positive impact on the public. The tagline is the next point users check on within your professional page and is usually located in the “about” area within the social network profiles. This is because a tagline provides a short sentence describing your brand, which must be relevant to your business and attract your readers’ attention.

Your profile page should include an impressive review of your business or resume of your professional qualifications, again this information should be identical throughout the social networks. Facebook and LinkedIn allow for more space as far as profiles are concerned. Here you can describe your brand in detail and use a more concise description on Twitter. Make sure you include the link to your business’ website on all the social networks.

Contact information is essential and must be included in all the social media profiles, as well as your blog or website. Be sure all contact information is coherent and keep in mind that communication software such as Skype, Yahoo and Windows live messenger and Gmail chat are useful and provide direct means of communication.

Do not forget to include your e-mail signature that should carry all information related to contact, tagline, profession this will help introduce and put your brand in the forefront. If you have an e-mail signature all those you contact from your social networks will have immediate information about your business as you will too.

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