Creating a logo contest is a very simply idea. If you need a logo or header graphic you can have one designed for you quickly and cheaply by creating a thread in a forum of graphic designers and offering prize money to whoever enters the best logo.

The contests section on Digital Point Forums is where I recommend doing this.

If you’ve never started a logo contest and you are in need cheap good looking logos then it’s something I highly recommend (unless you can make them yourself or decide you want to learn that skill of course). Looking down the Digital Point contest forum there many contest holders offing similar prize money but some contests seem to get more and better quality entries than others despite the same prize money on offer. Why? Because some of the contest holders don’t give enough information in their description for what they are looking for.

Essential Instructions to Include in Your Logo Contest:

• Size of the image in Pixels (e.g. 925 x 150)
• What it needs to say. Clarify whether you want some bigger writing as a title and smaller writing as a slogan.
• The style you want.

You may have no idea of what you would call the style you are imagining or you may not even be imagining a style, but if you are launching a new blog (or re-designing an old one) you must have a good idea of what kind of readers your blog will cater too.

A few questions to think about when describing what style you want

• Should it have a modern and slick cutting-edge look?
• Should it be big and fun or more serious?
• Should it contain images and if so what of?

I also find it useful to say something like “feel free to be creative”, which helps designers not worry about you thinking their design is wacky and also encourages more to take part as its more fun for them if they feel free to be creative with their work.

The one vital piece of information to go in in the title of your contest is how much money you are offering as prize money or you will find yourself with considerably less designers even visiting your contest page at all, yet alone entering a design.

If the rest of your site is set up in terms of colour schemes then you can provide a link to it in the contest and ask for the colours to match those already on the site.

It’s easy to feel like the longer instructions you write the less entries you get, but it its about quality not quantity. If someone cant be bothered to read your instructions they probably wont take much time over the logo.

If you don’t want to wait forever (who does!) then something like “quick entries greatly appreciated!” in the content of your post is effective. It’s not worth playing games saying “need urgently contest will close in 24 hours” to try and push designers to enter your contest, it doesn’t work.

Generally speaking if you follow these instructions and offer a reasonable amount of prize money you are pretty much guaranteed to get entries. Wait at a few hours (roughly 5 hours) before considering bumping your thread as it takes time for designs to be completed and getting away with more than one bump without penalization is pretty lucky.

Ask that entries into your contest are posted openly in the forum thread so everyone can see each others designs and the feedback you provide to each. Give feedback to every entry, (even if you are sure you won’t use it) so that everyone can learn from each other to gain clearer idea of what you want. Always be friendly with positives and negatives included in your critique (or at least a “thank you for your entry”). There are plenty of other contests the designer could enter and so it’s all about making them feel inclined to enter yours.

Good luck with your logo contest!

This is a guest post by Al who runs a reference guide online.

Gone are the days when you needed to pick up a newspaper to get your news, or wait for the 6 o’clock news to find out what’s happening in your town or around the world. Now more than ever, up-to-the-minute technology is fusing into our lives, enabling us to not only choose when to read out news, but what news to read and where to read them.

Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary feeds, more commonly knows as RSS feeds, is in great part, the source of that fusion. An application initially created for Netscape back in 1999, it has evolved into one of the most readily available methods of obtaining information quickly and easily.

In simplest terms, RSS feeds give the user a way to go to their favorite websites, subscribe to their content, and access their information as it is updated, setting it up in a simple, readable and accessible format, either on their desktop or on their browser. Some of us can’t honestly remember web browsing without the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds, and it’s hard to imagine it being taken away.The RSS feed system, initially created as a tiny, seemingly insignificant companion piece to a popular browser, is now an indispensible tool in our everyday Internet life.

One thing that’s become increasingly evident is the role that RSS feeds — more specifically, online aggregated news feeds — have played in the growth of technology and, more specifically, information exchange. The use of RSS feeds grows as the demand for newspapers as a whole dwindles, and it makes sense; after all, why get dated information from a newspaper when you can get updates every minute or so on your computer?

Which is why sites like Techmeme and News Tracker are becoming more and more popular. These automated sites are linked to RSS feeds all over the Internet. When the feeds are updated, so is the page — it’s as simple as that, yet it is so much more vital than what its simplicity implies. For those of us that are subscribed to numerous feeds, it becomes hard to go through all of our updates and read.

RSS aggregated news sources eliminate the work of having to go through all of your live bookmarks and look for breaking news; these sites already have those feeds condensed for you, in an accessible, easy to use website. The difference between these sites and social bookmarking sites such as del.ic.iou.s is that RSS aggregated sites are automated, so they give you up-to-the-minute information, when you need it. The automation factor, in conjunction to the simplicity and accesibility found in these RSS aggregated news source websites is what makes them such an amazing new addition to the world of web surfing.

From its humble beginnings as just another browser application, RSS feeds have evolved by leaps and bounds, into the future of information exchange worldwide.

Do you ever suffer from the affliction of getting bored with something that you know will work? I’ve been looking back across my blogging history and I’ve realized the most productive and efficient times were when I was trying out every trick in the book to drive traffic. When I started blogging leaving comments on other blogs, writing blog posts, submitting sites to directories manually and working on building up various social media profiles were all part of my daily routine. Photography by Simon Welsh

Over time I’ve found myself “filtering” through these practices, supposedly leaving only the most time efficient ones left. I knew they all worked “a bit”, but just didn’t result in fast enough growth. The problem that arose is that I realized writing content is by far the most useful thing that can be done. This realization makes the other tasks seem pointless and ineffective, which left me in a constant struggle to keep creating new content all the time.

Despite the fact I’d learned a valuable lesson about how I should be spending my time, it was impossible to write posts all day long and I actually became less efficient than when I was a beginner. Writing all day is of course impossible for everyone (or at least its impossible to keep it at a high standard all the time) and resulted in feelings of burnout and wasted hours pondering starting even more blogs on topics I had ideas to write about.

Solution To The Marketing-Writing Balance:

Outsourcing content creation solves everything.

You can keep marketing all day long as long as there is enough new content to promote, but writing decent quality content all day long cannot be done. Therefore if you outsource content creation and only spend 20% of your time writing, the other 80% can be spent marketing what the hired writers have written. Personally I can write quite happily for about 20% of the day, but it would be crazy to spend the other 80% marketing what I’d written, that ratio needs to be flipped around! Outsourcing content so you have several blog posts each day to promote flips the ratio.

You could say that writing is effective when its enjoyable and marketing is enjoyable when its effective.  In terms of applying that to blogging, writing content should be the first thing to outsource and marketing can be done all the time by you as the main administrator of a blog network.

That might sound crazy, but its true. I have a number of niche blogs with just 5-10 posts on them which all receive a small but constant trickle of traffic from Google to earn about a dollar a day each. I have left some of them for upwards of 3 months without any new content because they were sitting there adding a few dollars to the pot quite nicely.

I’ve found that adding a single new post to a blog that hasn’t been updated for some time (at least a month) can “upset the balance”, causing a change in the keywords it ranks for - not always for the best.

As you probably know one of Google’s ranking factors is how new the content is. Generally a blog that is updated daily will be given slightly higher rankings for all their posts, simply because they are keeping up with the times and so are more likely to be relevant to what people are searching for. Adding one new post is not enough to gain this “freshness bonus”; all it serves is to alter the keyword ratios (retro!) on the Homepage by pushing a previous post off the Homepage.

This theory only applies to small niche blogs that are seemingly “dead” but where the owner knows differently. There’s no way adding a new post to a continuously updated site like Mashable would decrease its rankings

Don’t capsize your blog with a badly timed paddle stroke!

How Can An Old Niche Blog Be Updated Without Damage?

1. Don’t leave the blog without new content for that long in the first place. Keep it being seen as a fresh up to date blog. This may seem like the most sensible option but often the whole point of having a small niche blog is so you don’t have to keep updating them.

2. Add several posts. This is something well worth experimenting with. For example would it be better to add 5 new posts at once or to write 5 posts and stagger them, publishing one per week? With a flagship blog with loyal readers its obvious to stagger them, but that’s not necessarily the best way with a small niche blog. Both give different impressions to Google, but adding 5 or more posts to a blog that only has 5 posts in the first place gives a good chance that something will make it though to getting rankings that bring more traffic than before.

3. Don’t update the niche blog at all and just build a brand new one instead!

Blog Rhythms

Every blog has its own SEO Rhythm, which the owner needs to understand. I once sold a blog that had been doing great as long as it was updated every week. I had experimented myself and found if it wasn’t updated weekly it would lose its main rankings and traffic would plummet. I told the new owner this but I was ignored and I watched the site drop right down the SERPS.

Every blog is different, work with your experience and try new things out, keeping in mind that a new post doesn’t always mean more traffic.

Maybe you discovered a new hobby that you want to explore, maybe you have a new message to get across, maybe you just need some more money, or more likely a combination of all three. There are many reasons for starting a new blog, and depending on the reason for the blogs’ existence will determine how much planning and preparation needs doing before its launch.

For example, a quick niche blog based around a few keyword phrases doesn’t need as much planning as a flagship blog that you aim to devote at least one blog post a day towards.

Planning a new blog can be divided into two parts; the building of the blog and the launch of the blog in terms of marketing (and longer term marketing plans if necessary). This post will cover the planning of building a new blog.

Photography by Ben Pollard

What Do I Need To Think About When Planning A New Blog?

• Purpose of the blog. Why are you building it? This means choosing the weighting in terms of business blogging/labor of love.
• Domain name, Brand Name, slogan/tag line. Will you use .com or something else? Will you include the “Dot Com” in the brand name? Could people easily misspell your domain name? Does the name capture what your blog is all about?
• Blogging Platform and hosting WordPress, typepad or something different? I recommend WordPress hosted with BlueHost, which is what I have used cost effectively for well over a year without any serious problems.
• Layout and colour scheme (design). Will you use a free template and modify it yourself, pay a designer to do it all, or something in between? A great way to have an affordable custom header graphic/logo designed for you is by starting a design contest in the contests section of the Digital Point forums. This gives you options to choose from for very little money (we are talking $10-$50!).
• Content topic(s). This requires the most thought. It can be difficult to decide exactly what counts as “off-topic” at first, it can take time for content topics to slot into place. However, it’s best to plan ahead as far as possible so good decisions can be made about the names of blog post categories and the writing style. Make sure the issue of being yourself online is solved. Also check out my post about Pillar content.
• Day to Day running of the blog. Will you be doing it all yourself? Setting a posting frequency and sticking to it is vital in the early stages of a blogs life. Make sure you have enough time to write a post when needed, moderate comments, sort out the advertising, networking, building links etc. Setting the bar too high results in running out of steam, bloggers block and and all round bad time.
• Monetization. When (if at all) will you monetize and how? Check out my free Blog Monetization Strategies e-book for in depth information about this.
• Budgeting. Do you have money to invest? If so where? Personally I prefer investing more financially in the design of the blog than the marketing. Overall I invest far more time than money, which is what’s so great about blogs - anyone can do it without a big financial investment!
• Future expansion options. These commonly include adding a forum/ning network/job board/affiliate store.
• Search Engine Optimization. Choosing basic keywords to aim to rank for in Google, page titles, internal linking structure and linkbaits, all in as much detail as you choose. For more info about this read my guide to SEO.

It takes a lot of preparation to launch a new flagship blog and often the first month of a blogs life is the hardest as there are very few readers, who make the whole experience worthwhile. Getting though the first months takes patience and discipline, but is very rewarding. If you are starting a new blog I wish you the very best of luck!