Have you ever stopped to think that also offline you can gain visitors? Surely sometimes you tell your friends that you have a blog and encourage them to visit it. But to promote offline your blog you need a little more than some friends and relatives, you need to transmit your message to totally unknown people and also even without talking to them.

Here enter in the game two key factors we have talked about before:

• You need a Logo: it must look like a logo, if it is too complex it will look like a picture. Nike, Adidas, Apple… A simpler logo works better.
• You must have your own Domain: you can’t show a serious image with a blogspot or wordpress free subdomain URL.

I would like to have written this post before but till now I had no need to enter in this subject more deeply. As you know I live in Spain so it’s less productive to spend energy in offline promotion here than if I lived in USA or UK. Most people here prefer to read sites in Spanish rather than in English, even most of my friends don’t read me because I blog in English.

But next week I have a little trip to London. I’ll be there a few days, four of five, so it is a good opportunity to spread my word there. I started to think of the best ways I could use to make an offline promotion under my trip conditions, but before that let’s make a brain storm of some offline affordable marketing ways:

1. Business cards: this is good when you meet other business men and you want them to remember you. This method is often used in meetings or in reunions, also when you visit a company and you have a product that perhaps could interest them.
2. Customized pens: business cards tend to get lost and also this is a more informal and funny way. You can give away pens out of meetings and without reason because they are useful things.
3. Customized T-Shirts: this is a very good way and funny too. You can wear your advertisement or in case of having some money to spend you can give away some T-Shirts.

These are some very affordable ways everyone can try for little money. There are other cheap ways. You can make stickers and give them away or place them on your car.

I’m going to London only for tourism. I’m anxious to know this amazing city. I’ll spend all the time visiting every place and every corner of London so there’s no time for business cards and pens but I can seize the opportunity to let people know my brand:

I made several T-Shirts so I can wear one every day. I hope to attract the attention of possible new visitors from London so if you see a handsome young man wearing a binary ant like this one please feel free to say him hello!

If you want to read the other chapters of the Marketing Your Blog series here they are:

• Marketing Your Blog, #1. Comment On Blogs
• Marketing Your Blog, #2. Get Your Own Domain
• Marketing Your Blog, #3. Design Your Own Logo
• Marketing Your Blog, #4. Must Have A Favicon
• Marketing Your Blog, #5. Web Directories

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Here we are today with another chapter of my Marketing Your Blog series and this one is also highly related with SEO. Today we will submit our blog to several web directories. Our aim here is to get more external links to our blog. The more links the more relevance we will get on search engines index. Surely some people put importance on the PR (Page Rank) juice we can get from the web directories but it is less important than you think. If one directory with PR4 links you it doesn’t mean you have a PR4 link because you are placed into a category which has lower PR than the directory’s index and also you share the PR juice with all the URLs contained in that category. However it is true that you can get a bit.

Now it is time to be sincere with you. This article was planned lot of time ago but I procrastinated it because I was lazy about making a smart list of web directories… Until today . The reason is that I found a very interesting blog with a very good selection of web directories to submit our URL. I must thank Norhafidz Nordin from Norhafidz.com for his good work selecting them.

As Norhafidz said in his article it is far better for your Search Engine Optimization to get one way links than reciprocal links. Reciprocal links are seen by the search engines as a less natural link building than the previous one. All of us know the importance that Google puts in natural linkbuilding.

Most of these directories we have in the list placed below have three kind of submissions:

• Paid submission.
• Free submission with reciprocal link.
• Free submission.

Logically the paid one has more preference over the rest because your link probably will be shown as featured link. It is not said but probably the second one in preference is the one with reciprocal link but this is not what we want, I mean, one way links. However you can do what I’m doing now, an article about web directories in which you link back all of them. This way both parts, the blogger and the web directory, get benefits: the blogger gets backlinks without reciprocal in his index and the web directory is promoted too.

Here you have the list of web directories to submit your blog:

• DMoz Open Directory Project
• Greenairo Web Directory
• Maxell Panama
• SolutioNet Web Directory
• Ns8.biz Free Submit Web SEO Directory
• Lemurgene Links Directory
• Evil Directory
• Nonar Web Directory
• eSiq Directory
• Trunek Directory
• Wisob Directory

If you want to read the other chapters of the Marketing Your Blog series here they are:

• Marketing Your Blog, #1. Comment On Blogs
• Marketing Your Blog, #2. Get Your Own Domain
• Marketing Your Blog, #3. Design Your Own Logo
• Marketing Your Blog, #4. Must Have A Favicon

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This article I’m writing is a translation of one I wrote on March in my Spanish blog. It was based on an experiment I made which gave me a very interesting increase in traffic and also lots of critics and good opinions about that too. I’ll translate it but I’ll leave apart some things not interesting for you at all.

Once upon a time there was a cute and handsome young blogger who had one of the best blogs ever seen. Suddenly he received by mail and by mistake a list of 2821 email addresses in an spammy email sent by a web directory:

Did you like the introduction? Don’t waste your time clicking on the picture, I’m not going to give you any of those three thousand emails . This is a reduced screen capture (3200×1200) with all the recipients of that email.

As I said before a web directory owner wanted to promote his service and he made the stupid mistake of publishing all the email addresses. The first thing I thought was - OMG! He couldn’t do it worse, stupid spammer… - but even I knew it was spam I visited the directory to check out if it was as bad as their webmaster, so in spite of all I said before I was a conversion because he got what he wanted, I mean visits, I was a success for him in traffic terms. Before carrying on with the rest of the article let’s see what is spam and whether it is legal.

What is Mail Spam ? It is the act or action of sending emails not consented and massively.

Is it legal? It depends on the country, some are stricter at this point than others. In Spain it is forbidden for commercial purposes. if you want to enter more deeply in the matter you’ll have to consult the law for Information Services of your country. To make it short if you don’t have commercial purposes it is not illegal but it is or it could be inmoral or unethical.

Having said that and seeing that I had visited the disastrous spammer’s site I began to think of the rate of success/conversions that the mail spam would get as a marketing strategy, so I said to myself - Well, I don’t have commercial purposes and I will not provide further information (emails) than the one available, Why don’t I make a little experiment?. - Then it came the internal debate whether or not to do so, it took me a while to decide… but at the end I did it. I sent another spammy email to 400 addresses in groups of about 60, about 7 emails. I didn’t write anything special, only that I was making an spammy experiment. It was very important to make it clear to the recipients that I was doing spam. Obviously there was the URL of my blog in the content.

Let’s see a graph of the results:

It is totally clear there is an increase in traffic the day I made the experiment. I almost doubled the visits. Before the experiment my blog was averaging 50 unique daily visitors, if I don’t take in count holidays, and the day I did it the blog reached 150 unique daily visitors so if I sent 400 emails and 100 of those people (150-50) came to my blog I had a 25% of success with the mail spam. Amazing! So we have in conclusion that mail spam works and it can do it in a very important percentage.

Ok, ok, don’t shoot me with a gun, I’m not a mail spammer, this was only an experiment . I’m not going to do it again. As I said before it isn’t ethical because you disturb other people with things they probably don’t want to read, and worse than that, you can make available to other spammers the email addresses of that people. Don’t stop reading because you can learn …

Ways to avoid being a victim of spam

1. Do not write your email address publicly on blogs, websites, forums, etc. This is because there are automatic crawlers looking for information like this for this evil purpose. You can write it using formats like yourname at yourdomain dot com or yourname [at] yourdomain dot com, or also instead of putting text you can put a picture showing your address.
2. Avoid taking part in email chains, ask your friends or relatives for not including you in them. These chains make available to spammers hundreds and hundreds of email addresses.
3. Don’t believe in those websites that promise they will told you who of your contacts have blocked you on MSN if you write your email address and your password. This is a total cheat, they only want al the email addresses you have in your address book.
4. Do not reply to spam mails. If you do it the spammers know your address is a valid one and they can send you more spam. Also the unsubscribe link placed on the bottom of the mail can be used with this intention so if you have never subscribed to an specific site but it sends you spam it is better to block it with a filter.

I hope this advice helps you to avoid being a victim of spam and also to avoid making your friends and family victims too.

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In the last post I showed you some tricks about how to design your own logo. It is your brand, your identity. It makes other people to recognize you at first sight. I hope you have added it in you profile image of all the social networks you are in.

Now we are going to convert it into a favicon. Do you know what is a favicon? This word comes from favorites + icon and is the picture that appears aside a web or blog when it is stored in the favorites. Also it appears in the url bar of the Internet browsers. This way we get two important things:

1. People can distinguish us better among all the websites they can have stored in their favorites and also among the websites they have opened in several tabs.
2. We look like more professional adding this favicon to the url bar. All the A-list bloggers (Shoemoney, JohnChow, Problogger, Binary Ant, etc…) have our logo as a favicon. Why are you laughing? Don’t you think I am an A-list blogger? Give me time

It is really easy. Html-kit.com has a tool that makes a favicon from the image you want. You have the option of make an animated favicon, but personally I prefer a non animated one.

Once you have generated your favicon download the zip archive they give you. You have to upload the 16×16 favicon to the server where you have your blog/website and place it in the root folder. Then you have to add in the header, between the tags <header> and </header> the following code:

<link rel=“shortcut icon” href=“/favicon.ico” >

And this is all. Don’t you think your blog look like more professional?

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Before we start let’s talk about the concept Branding. This is the collection of technics that can be run to get your target market to choose you over your competition. These technics can be:

• designing a good logo.
• inventing a clever slogan.
• investing in adversising.
• …

Don’t get scared. We are not going too deep in this features. This post deals about the funniest off all those points: design a logo .

Why do you need a logo?

You need an image which can be associated with yourself and your blog just at first sight. Most of the important bloggers have our own ( ) logo. Look at Shoemoney and his Super-Dollar and look at me, I have the Binary Ant:

Now I can put it on my social networks and other services. Did you see my Twitter page? Did you see me on MyblogLog or BlogCatalog on other blogs?. When people know mi logo then is is easy for them to recognize me when they see me on any service.

Let’s try to design a simple one. I use Gimp to make my designs. It is free and very similar to Photoshop, but it can’t make vectorial designs so if you wanna a vectorial logo you’ll need a suite for vectorial design like Adobe Illustrator for example. The problem is that good vectorial suites are not for free.

First of all I must apologize. My Gimp is in Spanish and I can’t find how to change it to English to tell you the correct instructions. I’m goint to translate to English the options I have.

Gimp has three windows:

• Gimp Tools: the one with all tool buttons.
• Image or desigh: with your picture.
• Layers: this shows all the layers you have.

Open Gimp and create a new image: File > New and about 600px x 600px

Delete the layer through the opcion Layer > Delete. Then create a new empty layer, this one will be a transparent one.

With the Eliptical Selection Tool (the one in the green square), and with the Shift key pressed draw a circle. The Shift key must be pressed in order to draw a perfect one. Then fill it with red color. The tool for fill the circle is the one pointed by the red arrow. Now more or less now you have something like this:

Now in the Layers window click with the mouse right button on the layer with the red circle and select Alpha Selection. Go to the Image window and click on Layer > New. Leave size as default and then click on Accept. Now you have another layer and a circle selection in it. Go to the Select menu on the Image window and choose the [Grow] option. Put 10 pixels. Fill this new circle with black color. Finally go to the Layers window and pull down the layer with the black circle under the layer with the red circle. You should have something like this, a red circle with a black border:

Now let’s put something in the red circle. What about an X? On Layers window select the red circle layer. Now on the Gimp Tools window select the Text tool, the one with the big black A. Click on the red circle.Because the red circle is very big (remember 600×600) we need to place a very big X, more or less 560 pixels. The font I used was Bookman Old Style Semi-Bold and my X is a yellow one. Place it on the center of the circle. Then again with the trick of Alpha Selection, now with the Text Layer, let’s give the X a black border. I remind you the steps:

1. Alpha Selection on the Text layer, the one with the X.
2. New Layer, this put your selection on the new layer.
3. Select menu and [Grow] option with 10px. The fill it with black color.
4. Pull this black X under the Text layer with the yellow X.

How are you doing? Here is my picture. Notice that now we have 4 layers: black circle, red circle, black X (this is not text, is a color filled selection) and the text layer with the X:

It could be our logo, couldn’t it? So we could leave here, but let’s make more like a web 2.0 image

For the following steps we have to combine the Text layer, the black X layer and the red circle layer all in the same one, so starting from the layer on top (the Text layer) combine it with the one below. At the end you must have 2 layers: the one with red circle and the yellow X, and the one with the black.

Go to the Layers window and with a right click on the red circle layer make and Alpha Selection. Now we have all the red circle selected. Then select the Eliptic Selection Tool from the Gimp Tools window and draw an elipse, this time with the Ctrl key pressed. This way we can draw an elipse bigger than the red circle. We want to select only an slice of the red circle, the slice between the red circle Alpha Selection and the new elipse we are drawing. Look at the picture to see what I mean:

Now that we have this selection we can modify the color properties. In the Image window go to Tools > Color Tools > Brightness and Contrast. Change Brightness to the max value, 127. Do you see the effect? It is really cool, isn’t it? This is the result, your amazing logo

This is all. This was an easy design, you can complicate it whatever you want. The more complication probably the more impact it could cause.

I hope you liked this post. If so perhaps you could Digg It, for the moment I have never been digged so I would like it

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