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Customer success stories–also referred to as case studies–are a terrific way to bolster your Web and print marketing business. They’re convincing because they provide third-party testimonials of how a customer used your service to solve a problem.

You can write customer success stories as narratives (like magazine articles) or structure them in a format that you use with all your success stories. For marketing, I prefer the structured approach because I can get the point across with less copy than a narrative form.

Business people are willing to read more than consumers but I still believe brevity is better for case studies, especially when published as a Web page or in an e-newsletter. One or  two pages does the trick for me.

My approach to writing success stories is to first state the problem, then describe how the company’s product or service solved the problem, and then wrap up with the benefits of the solution or what most business people would call their ROI, or “return on investment.” (more…)

Welcome to the second installment of “improve your SEO”. This tutorial will show the best way to structure the content of you website to make it is easier to read and better to find. If you haven’t already, why not check out the first installment of the series “Google tools“, which focuses on how to use Google’s webmaster tools to your advantage. This Tutorial is aimed at anyone keen to improve their websites search ability by using a few powerful techniques. (more…)

This is part 1 in a series of tutorials which will help you discover new methods for improving your Search Engine Optimization. From better code practice to tricks of the trade these tutorials will cover a wide range of techniques to help you improve your overall search ranking performance. This first installment will show you how you can improve your search engine ranking by using Google’s web master tools. a free solution which will provide you with an array of powerful tools to to help increase traffic to your website. (more…)

One of the most popular formats for online advertisements, especially amongst blogs, is the 125px by 125px square ad. Who knows why. Perhaps the size makes it easy to use in both narrow sidebars in a single column and wider sidebars as well in two columns. Whatever the reason, it’s popularity is nice for both designers as well as advertisers. Designers because we can design around this block size when creating new designs. Advertisers because having a unified size means having to create less “custom” sizes for each new place they advertise.

Perhaps the easiest way to sell these spots on your website is by filling the unsold spots with mock advertisements which are linked to a page in which potential new advertisers can get more information about buying the spot. These “Advertise Here” graphics should be catchy, but not too catchy as to overwhelm current advertisers. Due to the constrained space, trying to provide any other information other than “Advertise Here” is probably a bad idea. Perhaps you could fit in a price, but that might be considered tacky and I would avoid it.

Here is an example of a bad “Advertise Here” graphic:

Better to be brief in your graphic, and let the image that it links to do the talking.

Freebies

Below are some totally original, nicer “Advertise Here” graphics. Classy, fun, hip, grungy… Use them for whatever you would like. At the bottom there is a link to a ZIP file containing all the original Photoshop files, for you own alternations.

DOWNLOAD ALL EXAMPLES
(Photoshop files & PNG files included.)

Some of my favourite posts for tutorialblog are the roundups of great designs and the color series, so over the last week I have been working on creating a new site which will showcase the best xhtml/CSS designs from around the web. The site is named : CSS Heroes ….

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