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 Digital Visions

By Leah Murray  - guest blogger, photographer and digital imaging artist 

A picture is STILL worth a thousand words! So it better be a great picture!

Today more than ever before, you are what you seem.

Customers can find out a LOT about us and our small businesses in short order using their web browser, cell phone, or networks of friends and family. Our business image is everywhere, and our business IMAGES are more than ever a part of our stock-in-trade.

So how do we build up a cohesive set of images for our business to use in our branding, communications and marketing efforts without blowing a huge budget on specialists and staffers? In a small to medium sized business, time, money and people are always in tight supply, so we have to be organized and effective in what we do.

So let's start from the beginning.

When you went into business, you chose a business name, probably a logo or signature image, and you got these put on some business cards, along with maybe some envelopes and letterhead. These are the first items in your archive of business images -- you more than likely use or need them all the time.

In order to really make effective use of them in all the places you want them to show up nowadays (on your print marketing materials and packaging, your web site, your facebook fan or business page, your Twitter account, beside your LinkedIn profile, on your email campaigns and on your signage for your business and vehicles), you will need to make sure you have these images ready and in usable forms.

Ready to hand is pretty straightforward: if you have a set of folders for your business, you can just create a new one under Marketing that is called "myBrand" or "BizImages" if you prefer and put all the copies of this image that you have on hand in there, making SURE that you name each one differently from the others so that you don't shortchange yourself by overwriting some of them.

Female PhotographerNow let's take a look at this collection:

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By Elsie Whitelock - blogging, digital and social media marketing and Web designing 

Socxial Media is here

Ready to start blogging? Not sure what is involved? Here are some guidelines and tips.

Just what is a blog?
In its simplest form, a blog is your personal diary used to collaborate and share your experiences and other things that you find interesting. Blogging allows you to connect and interact with anyone who reads your stuff. However many businesses are using blogging to help their customers and prospects do business with them more easily by enabling immediate engagement. Well what does that mean? I think it means being actively interested in participating in the online community and being actively interested in helping others out. Sound like a good idea; sharing and helping? It does to me.

You can use blogs to share experiences, share new and product/service information, tell what you are doing, share tips and tricks, help solve problems, to name just a few. But the real important thing is to engage others.

So who can read/comment on your blog?
With blogging, you can control who can read and write on your blog. For example if you wanted to have just a family blog where you share personal family stories, events, etc. and photos, you can do that via controls so that only that specific group has access. Or you can make your blog available to the whole world; of course that means anyone with Internet access.

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