This page includes some quick links and tips for your Internet marketing. More detail on individual areas of focus is covered in the blog.
There are many things to help you with your Internet strategy and marketing. To get you started, the following should be considered:
- What do you want to achieve with your business?
- Who are your ideal clients?
- What do they want?
- How can you get it to them in a way that they understand and appreciate?
Spend some time surfing the web yourself. Try to find your competitors without using their company names – keep going until you do find them (but don’t assume that they’re getting their Internet marketing right). Make a note of the phrases you’re using and how successful they are.
Setting up a blog enables you to build your reputation in your sector. By offering regular and topical information and discussion on areas that your clients will find useful and interesting, your profile will be raised on several levels – it will attract attention.
Then you can take some of that information into a newsletter with relative ease – providing another way to stay in touch with your clients – perhaps also including useful posts and links for your readers.
flickr-cc – A minimal Flickr search utility for Creative Commons, Public Domain, US Government Work, and “no known copyright” photos.
Fotolia – a long-time favourite for royalty-free stock images from £1 each.
Photo Pin – another resource to find royalty-free and free images that you can use (check whether Commercial Creative Commons License or Non-Commercial Creative Commons License though).
Ebook resources: For doing your own ebook covers, I suggest free ebook cover templates and tutorials.
Font Pair helps designers pair Google Fonts
What is caching? Explained so anyone can understand
Holding text
For when you don’t have your words ready for your web pages, add something a bit different to the usual Lorem ipsum text – visit MeetTheIpsums and find your favourite.
Accessibility
A really useful way to see if your colours will work together is Web AIM’s Color Contrast Checker. Indeed their Resources page provides a wealth of useful stuff for any web designer.
The Wave Web Accessibility Tool tells you everything it can about how accessible your website is, and what to improve. Invaluable.
Also take a look through the Accessibility blog at .gov.uk, the dos and don’ts on designing for accessibility page is a good place to start.