This is a powerful example of how rewording such a simple phrase gets an entirely different reaction. The blind homeless man has a cardboard sign with the words “I’m Blind – Please Help”. An onlooker stops and changes his sign to read “It’s a beautiful day and I can’t see it”, and then the spare changes starts coming in like money is falling from the sky.

Thinking outside the box (as cliche as that expression is) when it comes to slogans and advertising propaganda is definitely necessary. Sometimes being overly simple and direct with your message can cause your audience to overlook it. We all are being inundated with information on a daily basis; so much that we tend to zone most things out, sometimes without even realizing it. Think about this video on your next marketing project, whether you are designing a simple ad, or titling your next tweet or blog post; I know I will.

There are a lot of people that don’t really see the value in having a free Tumblr blog, for a few different reasons.  Maybe you’ve got a pretty hopping WordPress blog already, so why should you need another stupid blog to have to manage?  If you aren’t running a business online, and don’t care about getting more hits and search engine traffic, then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) probably isn’t on the top of your list of concerns.  If you just want a basic blog that is easy to use and post to, then tumblr is amazingly simple and easy to get started.  It’s even easier than a free wordpress.com or blogger.com blog.  This article is mainly considering tumblr as a tool to drive traffic toward your other websites.  Here are some reasons why I think tumblr is pretty awesome, as a supplement to your existing website or blog.

1. You get all dofollow backlinks to any url you post on your blog. This is great for SEO and developing quality backlinks.

2. There is an endless stream of cool eyecandy, videos, articles and content that you can reblog. What’s the point in this, if there is duplicate text and content?  Well, when it comes to reblogging articles, I don’t really see the point for SEO.  Google and the search engines don’t take very well to duplicate text.  What they do like, is unique text.  So, if you’re going to reblog a video, photo, or other media – try and rephrase the description and keywords, maybe even the title a bit, so that it’s a little bit different.  It might help for a little while, until people reblog the crap out of it again.

3.  Tumblr reblogs create awesome content for tweets and twitter microblog posts. It’s so simple to set up your twitter account, so that every time you reblog on tumblr, it will tweet the description and the link to the site, photo or video you are reblogging. It’s pretty easy to keep the descriptions under 140 characaters, and makes finding cool content to feed to your followers a cinch.

4.  The viral-ness of tumblr is great if you’re trying to promote your youtube videos, photos, music, and more. If people like what they see, then they will reblog it.  Every time it’s reblogged, it will link back to your original post or website!  Every time I post to tumblr I see it as planting a little seed, here and there.  You never know what’s going to start getting popular.  An important thing for this to be the most effective, however, is having enough followers to get the ball rolling.  Remember that content is key, and if people like your taste, the style of the stuff you post on your tumblr blog, they’re more apt to follow you.

I’m no expert, but those are the conclusions I’ve come to – let me know what you think!  Here’s a link to my tumblr stream – please follow me, and I’ll follow you back.

Don’t you just love the smell of fresh fruit?  Or maybe the smell of fresh plastic is more your thing… like when you get some new electronics or maybe some new camera gear?  Well, I decided to finally go WordPress with my blogging.  It will be better for SEO and also will be a lot more customizable than my previous blog host.  So far I’m loving it, but I did happen to kill an entire Saturday migrating over and tweaking things to get them the way I wanted.  In time, this web stuff gets easier.  It’s always a pain in the balls to get them started, and then after that it’s just a little maintenance and design things here and there.

We all want to have a decent website, at least something to show the world what we basically do for work.  Online efforts to have some sort of a web presence with decent SEO are something that are vital for all businesses today.  Especially as photographers and graphic designers, this is something that is practically a must have.  Unfortunately, we are so busy we don’t always have a chance to throw something together.  It has the logo I designed for myself on it (finally) and now I finally feel like I have something worth parking on my domain name.  I plan on improving it someday, but for now it’s something.  Domain name value goes a long way. Read the rest of this entry »