If you are planning to start a business soon, getting a good logo is a long-term investment. Your logo is the face of your business and helps your customers to identify you in the masses. It is your number one business’s asset as it will appreciate in value as times goes by so it is worth the effort, time and money to invest in a good logo.

But what makes a good logo? Below is a list that every business owners must know before getting a logo.

Convey Your Business Message
You logo must reflect the vision of your business, it should not only tell people who you are but also what you are. A good logo must incorporate your business vision, values and even your future business plan. If you are, for instance, doing a health business for women, you would not want your logo to look too feminine as you may want to expand into men health business in future.

In addition, a logo must convey the attributes of the business. If you are in the consulting business, you may want to show strength, speed and focus in your logo, a good logo should be able to incorporate these attributes and communicate them to the customers.

Simple Yet Attractive
A good logo must be simple but yet eye catching, creative and attractive as people can identify a bad logo just as quickly as good logo. A simple logo should not contain superfluous elements like complicated lines, shapes, fancy borders, special effect like fuzzy drop shadows, glowing edge and gradual tone of colors. A simple logo will give an everlasting impression to your targeted customers than a complicated one. Some of the famous and simple logos in the world such as the Nike Swoosh logo, the Apple Computer logo with a bite, the MacDonald’s Gold Arch and the 3 diamonds shape of Mitsubishi logo. These logos have become iconic and instantly recognizable by consumers throughout the world.

Scaleable
Technically, a simple logo helps in production as it can be reproduced effectively throughout all media. A good logo not only must look good on screen but it must also look good on magazine, newspaper, billboard, banner, delivery van or even on other small merchandises. And that is another reason why logo is recommended to use the least color as possible so that it will not face too much of colors problem. Some colors may not reproduce well on certain medium which may eventually limit the business function. One good example is Apple Computer; its logo was initially comprised of several color stripes but was eventually replaced with a monochrome logo so that it can be reproduced well on Apple laptop cover.

Next, make sure the logo looks good too when produced in black and white. This is especially important during faxing or doing black-and-white advertising. Extra care must also be taken if the logo need to scale up and down, it should still look visible and sharp while in either ways.

Colors & Style
Colors help to convey mood while style convey the image of your business that you want to portray. Choosing the right colors and style are extremely important as they will impact your business image and credibility. If, for example, your business wants to portray a serious and professional image then the colors chosen should not be too loud and the style must not be too funky. You want your customers to see you as a trustworthy and reliable business not any entertainment business so avoid flashy colors totally.

Also, all colors have a psychological meaning, each industries has its own sets of colors. For example, businesses like banking, finance, accounting and consulting tend to use cold colors like blue, green, purple and brown to depict trustworthy and professionalism. On the other hand, businesses such as F&B and children-related services tend to use warm colors such as red, orange, yellow to depict warm, happiness and friendliness. So a good logo should have colors that can deliver the business image, attributes and values.

Memorable
A memorable logo should be unique and stand out distinctly from the rest of your competitors. A logo which is too similar to your competitors may cause confusions among your customers, suppliers and partners. It is recommended that you check out your competitors’ logo before getting a logo. There were already many cases where companies suing their competitors for having too similar logo.

Having a memorable logo helps your customers to recognize your business easily and instantly. Customers tend to trust businesses they can recognize,therefore, with a memorable logo, it can also help to build loyalty in long term.

Timeless
A good logo must be able to stand in the test of times, one good example is the Coca Cola logo; it has never changed ever since 1885. A well-designed logo should not follow the latest trend or fashion; the design will not be affected by time and become stronger and stronger over time. Make sure you get a logo that will look good today as well as in 20 years time, you will be thankful for the effort and money save in future.

The above is a brief guide on what make a good logo, it will be a good startup guide for those who have no experience but intend to get a logo for their business. If you think there is other element that make up a good logo, please feel free to leave your comment below.

Have you ever wondered how could you add your own photo or representative image to a blog, forum or other social media sites while you are commenting? If you want to establish a relationship and trust with other bloggers or readers, it is good to show your face to them so that they can identify with you. This photo or image will become your avatar and once you have it set up, it will appear everywhere when you post a comment.

Here are the steps on how you can add your avatar photo,

1. Go to Gravatar website and click on “Get your Gravatar today >>”.
2. Enter your email address, please use the email address you normally use for commenting on other blogs, forum or social media.
3. A confirmation email will send to your email address. Check your email and click on the link to activate it.
4. You will be asked to add a photo or an image to your email address. You can select the photo from your own computer’s hard disk, internet or webcam.
5. Do not worry about the size or cropping, you can upload the photo first and crop later.
6. Once you have selected the part of photo you want and crop, click on “Crop and Finish” to go next.
7. You will be asked to give a rating to your own avatar photo, they are G, PG, R and X. The main reason is some of photo may not be decent enough to be publicly displayed so it will fall under PG, R and X rated. But if you want to establish credibility and are going to show your face publicly then upload a good photo and select G.
8. You are now done so from now when you post comment on other people’s blog, your avatar will nicely show up besides your comment just as below.

Try it and have fun!

If you are thinking of adding a newsletter subscription box to your wordpress blog but do not want the hassle of copying the code from Constant Contact to Wordpress individually, here is a quick way to do it.  However, please note that this plugin only work for blog installed in the root directory, if your blog is installed in sub-directory like www.yourdomain.com/blog, it will not work unfortunately.

1. Log into your wordpress and click on “Plugins” then “Add New”.
2. Enter “Constant Contact” in the search box and click on “Search plugin” to search.
3. A list of plugins will appear, you can select the first one and click “Install” then “Install Now” to start.
4. After you have successfully installed the plugin, go to step 8 otherwise see next step.
5. If you having problem installing in wordpress, alternatively you can download the plugin from wordpress.org. Click here to go to the page and download now.
6. Once you have downloaded the zip file, unzip and ftp to your server.
7. Upload the zip to your “plugins” folder which is under the “wp-content” folder. Once you have uploaded, go back to wordpress dashboard.
8. Click on “Plugins” and find “Constant Contact Widget” then click on “Activate” to activate it.
9. Then go to “Appearance”, “Widgets” and drag “Constant Contact” to the sidebar.
10. Click on the setting and you will see the screen as below.



11. Fill in your Constant Contact username, password and the name of the mailing list, make sure they are the same as your Constant Contact account otherwise it will give you errors.
12. After entering the first 3 fields, you can leave the rest of fields as default, click on “Update Setting” to finish.
13. Go to your blog and you should be able to see the newsletter subscription box appear at the left hand panel of your blog.

 
If you encountered any problem with installation, you can check it out with the author at the following link. Good Luck!

Gopi’s Wordpress Plugin & Tech News: http://gopi.coolpage.biz/demo/2009/07/18/constant-contact/

It may seem difficult to get your wordpress.com blog (not wordpress.org blog) verify by Google webmaster tools when you are not allowed any FTP access to wordpress.com. There used to be a way to work around it by creating a new page and pasting the verification filename given by Google webmaster tools into it but it no longer work now. There is another quick and easy method you can try, please follow the steps as below.

1. Go to the Google Webmaster Tools and log in using your Google account.
2. Click on the “Add a Site …” button and then add the URL of your wordpress.com blog, for example myblog.wordpress.com and click the button “Continue” to proceed.
3. You will then ask to verify your wordpress.com blog, use the “Meta Tag” verification method, copy the meta tag inside the box which should look something like the following:
<meta name="google-site-verification" 
content="FvPFGdskP2kS0hwchZliE2C5rgBOcPNkeKw0ujJSZwo"/>
4. Please note you do not copy the above Meta Tag, you should have your own unique Meta Tag, copy the whole thing and leave the page open.
5. Go to your wordpress.com, log in and go to the dashboard.
6. Click on “Tools” at the left hand panel, it should the second last items on the panel.
7. Scroll down the page and you will see “Webmaster Tools Verification”.
8. Paste the Meta Tag you have copied earlier into the box besides “Google Webmaster Tools” and click on “save the changes”.
9. Go back to Google webmaster tools verification page and click on the button “Verify” and you should be done.

Your wordpress.com should be now verified by Google webmaster tools. To take advantage of Google webmaster tools, you can also add in your blog feed into the “Sitemaps” section so that Googlebot can crawl your blog more efficiently. To find out your feed’s URL, click the Feed Validator here to check. Once you got the feed’s URL which looks like something as below:

myblog.wordpress.com/feed or
myblog.wordpress.com/?feed=atom

Click on the “Submit a Sitemap” to submit your feed and you will need to wait a few minutes before it is approved. Once it is approved, your blog is now well verified and optimized.

1. Limited resources, time and budget but you are asked to achieve the star and moon at an unreasonable deadline.
2. Project scope creep - unexpected changes to the project requirement and scope.
3. Ineffective communication within the project team and between customers.
4. Your office culture of resistance to change hinders the adoption of complex project management skills and software.
5. Office politics is the least thing you expect but it happen; your project team is not operative and giving you more headaches.
6. Your boss is not supportive and expects you to solve all the problems, in short you have no one else to turn to.

If the above is what you have gone through, you are not alone; many project managers bound to face one or more project management challenges while managing the projects. While some scenarios are concerned more with management and human resources, some scenarios such as number 2 to 4 could be better managed with an effective project management toolkit or templates. These templates should be simple to use and easy to understand for all project team members or even to other stakeholders as they need to be kept informed of the project progress. 

If the project team is resistance of using complex project management software, such project management templates could be an alternative as most of them are created using Microsoft Office Excel and Word. To most people, Microsoft Office Suite is a familiar tool so the length of learning curve could be reduced drastically.

A good project management kit should cover all the phases of the project management cycle, starting from the project initiation phase, project planning phase, project execution phase to project closure phase. Each phase contains a detailed set of templates for different needs for example, business case template for developing business case, feasibility study template during feasibility phase, project charter template during project charter phase and more.

The individual project templates should allow you to effectively track the project progress and hold your team members accountable for responsibilities and deadlines. The concise and well-documented reports can allow you to communicate clearly to your other stakeholders such as your customers, boss, sponsors and outsourced vendors. When right information is channeled to the right people, there will be less miscommunication and surprises.

Such project templates should be reusable so that every project produces the same documentation and make it easy for future tracking and checking. It can be customized easily according to different project scenarios.

If you are interested to see the full set of project management templates, please click here. These templates could be a solution to your project challenges and may become your essential toolkit for achieving your project success.

You may know what email marketing is but did you fully take advantage of email marketing’s features? If you are struggling to capture and generate qualified leads for your company, there are two very important email marketing features that every email marketers not to be missed. They are the newsletter subscription form and autoresponder. These two email marketing features play a very important role in the pre-sales process and the reasons are explained as follow.

Newsletter Subscription Form
The purpose of the newsletter subscription form is to encourage visitors to subscribe to the company’s newsletter so that you can capture the visitors’ names, email addresses and other information. This information will become your in-house mailing list or sometimes known as subscribe list, it can then be used as a customer relationship building avenue. You can email exclusive information, invitation and promotion to your in-house mailing list as frequent as you want so that they know you make an effort to be in touch with them. By doing so, it also help to keep your visibility high in their minds. Most companies today also realized that they could get more sales faster from the inhouse mailing list than any other channels.

The newsletter subscription form is therefore an important feature not to be missed. It is not only an automatic lead capturer but a friendly tool to auto manage your subscribe list where subscribers subscribe, unsubscribe and bounce due to invalid domains and emails. It is easy to integrate newsletter subscription form into your website, many email marketing system offer easy to do it. If you are using Constant Contact for example, click on the “Contacts” on the top menu and click on “Join My Mailing List”. Under the “Add a Join My Mailing List Box to Your Website”, click on “Start Wizard to generate HTML code” to get customized subscription form, select the HTML code in the box and paste it into your website. Once your code is successfully pasted into the website, the newsletter subscription form will look like the following.

You can now start to collect the names and email addresses and in order to entice more people to sign up, you could offer them free gifts like free eBook for download, free coupon and discount. Make sure your subscribers are the first one to receive the free offer so that they can feel the worth of signing your newsletter.

Autoresponder
Another important email marketing feature is the autoresponder; it is an automatic program that answer emails that sent to it. The most popular use of autoresponder is “out-of-office” message but it plays a much more important role and function in email marketing. For instance, whenever someone subscribes to your mailing list, the autoresponder will automatically send a preset message to the subscribers. It could be a welcome message or a series of messages introducing the company product, services or even sales letters. All these messages can be set up once only and automatically send to every single subscriber. This greatly reduces your manual works and allows you to focus on your core competency.

In addition, we know that visitors normally don’t buy at their first visit, they may need a few round of exposures before they take action so by sending constant emails using autoreponder, it can act as a good reminders and follow-up. To do so, you can create different and customized autoresponders for your subscriber lists and all these different autoresponders can be set at a consecutive date and time you want to send. For example you are offering free investment tips to new subscribers and you can set up your autoresponder as follow.

Day 1:
Autoreponder 1 – Welcome message to New Subscribers

Day 2:
Autoresponder 2 – Overview of Today’s Investment

Day 3:
Autoresponder 3 – What are the Investment Instruments?

Day 4:
Autoresponder 4 – What are the Investment Strategies?

Day 5:
Autoresponder 5 – Tips on selecting the Right Investment?

All the above autoresponder can be set a day apart and send to new subscribers consecutively for 5 days. On the last day, you can send a personalized email asking them whether they need any help on investment. This is a good time you can propose a sale and close a deal with them.

Once you understand the benefit, it is recommended you try it out yourself. A customized autoresponder is not difficult to set up with the step-by-step wizard in any email marketing system. In Constant Contact, for example, you can click on the main menu “Emails” and click on “Autoresponder” and start by giving it a name and then proceed with the customization of design and message. You can even add a web page version if the recipient’s email client cannot support html messages. The autoresponder also has a “Forward to friend” feature so it can help to spread your message virally.

The newsletter subscription form and autoresponder are like your 24×7 salesperson capturing the leads and follow up with them automatically without your need of personal supervision. It definitely saves you a lot of time and resources. If you have not explored the full potential of these two helpful email marketing features, try it out today.

Nevertheless, they are a good start if you want hassle-free blog immediately and you can always opt for upgrade if you decide to have a more customized and controlled blog in future. However, if you still prefer to have a customized blog and want a hassle-free setup, choose a good web hosting company to help you. One of them such as Hostgator allows you to install wordpress blog with just a few clicks and you can get your blog instantly. They will also give you the latest version of wordpress, and provides free support for future wordpress upgrade. This is critical to blog success when wordpress requires constant upgrade for its widget plugins and version.

Once the blog is technically setup, you can in fact start blogging unless you want to have a more customized look and feel for your blog. You can change the design by changing its theme, there are a wide range of themes to choose from and you can get it from the blog or internet. To make your blog even powerful, you can add widgets to enhance its functionality. All these setup do not take too long to setup, once they are done, you are on your way to successful blogging.

If you still find the above take up too much of your time, you are welcome to seek professional help. Contact us today for a free initial consultation. Alternatively, you may like to check out our service for free installation of wordpress blog, click here to read more details.

If you have budget, you can easily hire a consultant to do it but if not, you may like to consider DIY. A ready-made marketing plan template may be your solution for a quick start. A professional marketing plan template can help you to organize the bulk of information in the shortest of time. It should give you a specific outline of presenting all the important elements in a marketing plan. At the same time, show you the logical flow from company background, objectives, recommended strategies, SWOT, budget and others without worrying missing any important piece of information.

You can get a copy of full-set of marketing plan template by clicking here. It is a comprehensive marketing plan template written in Microsoft word format and includes the following components:

• Market research and analysis
• Company profiling
• Target market
• Product/service definition
• Competitive analysis
• Sales model
• Marketing mix
• Implementation calendar and budget
• How-to articles and marketing examples

The marketing plan template also includes how-to articles and marketing examples, it will give you some inspirational ideas of creating an effective marketing plan. Most importantly, it helps to improves decision making, maximize resources and increase your chances of marketing success. The bonus of this marketing plan template also bundles together with sales template. The whole package now gives you a complete set of sales and marketing templates that help to streamline your sales and marketing process. Download it here and start writing your marketing plan now!

Nowadays, files are getting bigger and bigger, some times a simple video or audio clips, PDF or graphic file can easily take up about 10MB of space. It could be frustrating when you need to send over such huge files to your recipient as it could take ages to send over, it could be even annoying when some email services do not allow large files to be sent. Similarly, it could be a nightmare to receive large file as an attachment via email. It could clog up the downloading of emails where a few seconds process could turn into long-waiting process especially when you have urgent email to check. Hence, it is not a good email practice to send large file to your recipients, if you really need to, please inform them beforehand to check out when it is convenient to email them.

The good news is there is solution to this problem today. Many companies are offering services to upload large files to their servers and allow senders to email a link to their recipients so they can just download the huge file from the server directly. Best of all, some companies even offer free services for sending large file, one of them is www.transferbigfiles.com, it does not require complicated setup, no software to install, their interface is easy to use and allow you to send large file up to 1GB. You can also send multiple files together without the need to send one by one. Your file can save up to 5 days or 10 days if you are registered users.

There are other service providers who also provide such services and provide a large file size but require a fee when using their services. They have a monthly subscription plan or pay-as-you plan. The files are normally stored and accessible for limited period or can be downloaded for a number of times. They have added features such as protected password for downloading file, files management, public and private folders management, tracking statistics, drag-and-drop interface, search function, real-time preview of multimedia formats, backup and security. Below is a sample of such service providers. 

• www.yousendit.com
• www.totoexpress.com
• www.youshare.com
• www.mediafire.com
• www.fileqube.com

If you have experience on using any of the above services, feel free to share your experience or leave a comment.

During this tough economic period, many cash-strapped consumers now choose to eat at home than in restaurant. Many restaurants are thus struggling from slow businesses or suffer a loss. If you are one of the restaurant operators, it could be blessing in disguise as it offers you a good chance to re-look at your marketing and think of creative ways to market and promote your business actively in short and long-term period.

To some of you, the quickest solution is to outsource your marketing services. However, if engaging a professional marketing agency is not a viable choice as it involves quite a substantial sum of money, the alternative way is to DIY yourself but again, you may not have the necessary marketing experiences.

If you are caught in such a dilemma, don’t lose heart, you can try your hands on the tried-and-tested restaurant marketing tools which are created by experienced F&B professionals. They are relatively cost effective, comphrensive and easily accessible for the web; one of them is the Restaurant Marketing and Promotion tool which contains three quality videos that teach you step-by-step on how to promote your restaurant. In addition, it also contains the following templates which are essential during your promotion.

• Marketing plan template
• Marketing activity plan template
• Marketing promotional templates
• Marketing breakeven calculator
• Press Release template
• Discount voucher templates
• eNewsletter template
• Sample advertising flyers
• Bill fold advertisement flyers
• Data card templates
• Fast fact template
• Joint venture promotions
• Competitor analysis chart
• Database marketing
• Event information pack
• Functions and events pack
• Promotional tracking sheet

The above Restaurant Marketing and Promotion templates can help you save time by reducing unnecessary trial and errors and put your marketing activities into action immediately. As time goes by, you will find it can become an indispensable tool for your marketing promotion.