effective ways to market my graphic design biz ?

[graphic designer]

Hi can anyone tell me of some good effective approaches to advertising my graphic design business online ?

[inle]

I can help you both online & offline to BOOST your business..
At the same time, I will need to know what kind of marketing activities have you done so that we know where to look at..

Please advise..

[Neustance]

Hi there,

Open up a Twitter account, and start interacting with people in your industry. Open a blog and write useful content. PPC advertising to a local market.

Also ad ways for people to share about your business and even tweet about them, I invite you to try out my website Click to Tweet | Tweet sharing, the easy way. to create a fast "tweet about this" link with your marketing message and promote your services.

Francisco

[tytorelli]

Hello GD -

I would get setup on all the Social Networking sites such as: Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter to start. Customize & Optimize your profiles the best way you can. ALWAYS use your picture or logo as your default "image" on all the sites you create.

Also - Learn how to "triangulate" all these sites together so that people from all over will have a chance to see you and remember you!!

Never use these sites to SELL your service. Social Media is about relationship building and if you start blowing up messages with your services, you come across as spam and you will lose followers as well as respect. Nobody will follow you nor will they read your updates.

When it comes to Twitter and how to Automate your account: Check out "Top Secret Tweets". Awesome info that shows you, everything Twitter. It is a must have for Internet Marketing with Twitter.

Good Luck!! Top Secret Tweets | Dax Aurand & Ty Torelli

Ty

[DarrenH]

Hi.

I ran a mobile disco business from 1997 to 2008. for the first few years I was content to work for agencies and get work wherever I could as it was only really a hobby and I was only interested in a little back pocket cash.

In 2001, I started taking the whole thing more seriously. Coincidentally, I started getting interested in the whole concept of Internet marketing.

I read tons of information, even purchased a couple of those get rich quick products and built a site for my DJ business.

By the time 2005 had come round, the DJ site wasn’t doing that great, about 2 to 3 hundred unique visitors a month, which is about average for my particular niche.

In 2002, I’d read a book written by Ken Evoy called “Make Your Site Sell”. The information made a lot of sense and was based around the idea of providing useful information for your visitors, over-delivering on content so that you gained the trust of the folks that came to your site.

Once you have their trust and they come to see you as an expert in your field, they’re more likely to hire you or buy something from you right?

In late December 2004, I purchased ken Evoy’s flagship product “Site Build It!”.

“Site Build It!”, or SBI! Is a system that takes you from first principles of doing research to find out if your particular niche is likely to be a profitable one.

The Brainstorm It tools give you high quality keywords that you use to build the blueprint of your site around.

SBI! Takes care of submitting your pages and RSS feeds to the appropriate search engines and ping services. Provides the ability to take care of e-zine subscriptions, form building, traffic stats and search engines ranking reports, plus a whole lot of other modules, getting on for 60 I believe.

They have a members forum which is one of the most friendly and business success oriented forums I’ve ever seen, and Ken Evoy, the company founder regularly takes part to answer questions and offer advice.

OK, so how did this change my offline business?

Well, using SBI!, by the time 2007 came around, I was able to ditch all other forms of advertising as all of my new clients were finding me directly through organic searches at Google, yahoo etc.

I was receiving between 2.5 and 3 thousand unique visitors a month, which for the mobile Disco niche is very very good. What’s more, my main pages were ranked higher than the best known DJ and entertainment directories.

Due to a change of circumstances, I sold my business last year and now work from home.

I still use SBI! For my new site “MadAboutSmallville.com” and other’s sites that I’m building for them.

So, you don’t necessarily build a site focusing on your business. You build the site focusing on your business’s subject matter and gently work in your
Business throughout your site.

Ken Evoy calls it PREselling.

Sorry for the long post, but I hope you found it useful.

In any case, how ever you decide to promote yourself, I wish you all the best.

Cheers
Darren H

[sanvister]

Not everyone wants to be “Famous”, but being a more well-known designer DOES have its benefits. Not only will your work get more exposure, but you will make more money! Becoming a famous designer does not happen over night, but there are things you can do to quicken the process and if you are lucky you should be able to gain a lot of recognition if the things you do turn out well. So I wanted to do a 3 part series just going over some cool things designers could do if they want to not only become more apart of the design community, but also gain a little recognition and help others at the same time.

[rubsync]

SEO helps promote your site. It is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic of a website on search engines via organic search results for targeted keywords. Remember to do On-Page Optimization first then next is Off-Page Optimization.

[Advertising Swami]

I noticed a couple of threads right here on Youngentrepreneurs
where people were asking where to find graphic designers.

I dunno if the original poster is checking this thread, but
if he's not he's leaving money on the table.

As far as marketing with a website and all that SEO stuff -
well, it's labor intensive and you should do it but fundamentally
you should focus on working with clients who have ongoing needs.
These are also the clients who give the best referrals as well
as consistent work. A lot of startups will fail and have no
money... so they aren't great clients. If you're good at graphic
design, you'll probably still struggle to differentiate yourself
in the enormous buyer's market online - so if I were you I would
focus on pursuing relationships with decision makers who have
ongoing needs for graphic design. Online freelancing is
cut-throat and you'll be working for slave wages unless you
get in with clients who will pay for quality.

[affinity1]

I might be actually looking to hire someone for some logo work. But just by looking at your site, for being a graphic designer, your site doesnt have nearly enough visuals representing your work for me to want to hire you. You want there to be as little steps (delays/hurdles) as possible between your customers and them requesting you for work. Me having to ask for additionl samples adds one more hurdle for you to overcome before I request that you do work for me.

As far as advertising your work, I would consider using Craigslist (because it's free) or maybe contacting your local SCORE center and dropping off some business cards (the SCORE reps could hand them out to the people who come in looking for business advice).

You could also find out when your city is having large festivals/concerts/whatever that many people attend and volunteer to create their logo or design for them for free in exchange for some sort of "shout-out" at the event or on the event flyer/handout.