If you’re looking for a new design challenge to flex your creative muscle, look no further! Everything PR, one of the top PR news websites worldwide, and design crowdsourcing site Prova.fm are organizing a design contest in their quest for the best PR news header. The prize? 350 US dollars.

All you have to do is check out the contest details, browse through the articles on Everything PR to familiarize yourself with the style and general design of the website, then gather your creative and web design forces and start working! Once you have uploaded your proposed design, make sure you share it on your blog, on Twitter or Facebook. You will test it against your peers and your friends and they can vote your work on the Prova.fm site, making you one of the contest favorites.

Why should you join the contest? Other than the cash prize attached to it, this contest also means a chance for you to get some online visibility! Other than being featured in the Prova.fm contest winners hall of fame, your work will be features on a high traffic, worldwide appreciate PR news site which can lead to new clients wanting to hire you!

Now start designing and good luck!

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A while ago, I tried to access a website I like to read, home of the odd and unusual, offbeat news, with plenty of gorgeous pictures to support the content, and flawless copywriting. To my surprise, Google had blocked the site in my browser, because it contained malware. This happened because of a flaw in MediaTemple’s security patches for sites built on WordPress, that allowed hackers to insert a malicious script. It had to be there, unobserved, for quite a while, if Google decided to block the site.

To my knowledge, many MT customers who host there blogs, have to pay enormous sums, sometimes ridiculously high, for hosting, bandwidth, etc. A popular site like Life in the Fast Lane has seen, no doubt, bank-breaking bills. The price would be well worth it, if the site owner had peace of mind. But if it happened once, who says that it will never happen again. Continue reading

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A five-part series on online branding for businesses by Ryan Chaffin

1. What’s in a Name? Everything
2. SEO: Marketing in the New Millennium
3. PPC as a Model of Smart Advertising
4. Social Media: Highly Accessible Advertising
5. Freshening Up: Maintaining Your Brand Image

The proliferation of the internet has completely changed how our society exchanges information. What was once the realm of letters and paper is now the realm of e-mail and electronic documents. Just as the way of relaying information has evolved, so has the world of advertising. Billboards are now sidebar ads and the Yellow Pages are now Google Maps.

For many small businesses the internet has become a boon to their services, bringing them a whole host of new customers that they never would have seen in the years before the web. But, herein lays a problem. It is one thing to recognize the changing landscape of marketing and advertising, but a completely different thing to understand how this new mechanism works. Simply putting together a novice website and then letting is fester in cyber-anonymity is simply not enough. This is where a properly placed SEO campaign can assist your company in emerging from internet obscurity. Continue reading

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What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

Last week was yet another proof that there are so many wonderful articles being published out there, it’s almost impossible to keep up with all of them. Here’s a quick selection of part of the most interesting ones I ran across last week.

One great business post was published by Jonathan Fields, teaching us a very important lesson – How to Box and Sell Air.

From the never boring and always extremely funny Naomi Dunford, comes a great piece on email marketing – 7 Ways to Make Damn Sure Your Email gets Read.

Maribeth Kuzmeski found a great way to outrun your competitors and published it on WomenonBusiness.com: Killing Your Competition with (Client) Kindness.

Next, let me introduce you to two 5-ers: 5 Ways Your Blog is Undermining Your Business from ProBlogger and 5 Reasons You Absolutely MUST Share Your Vision Early and Often by Liz Strauss.

Following item on our list – a much retweeted and very helpful piece on Social Media Examiner – How to Grow a Following with Other People’s Popular Content.

For those who love some relevant numbers in the HR field and also for all the social media enthusiast, I recommend reading Social Media Recruiting, By the Numbers.

Closing today’s list, a question from ReadWriteWeb that a lot of busineses need to asnwer – Should Your Startup Stay Stealth?

That’s all for today, see you next Monday! Until then, please share the interesting articles you ran across in the comment section!

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Guest post by Philip Rudy

Getting your website some exposure can be one of the hardest things to do, especially when you are first starting out. Getting traffic to your website revolves around a lot of different things, like making sure you have great on-site SEO and a website that has great value to begin with. Once you have these two basic (but sometimes very difficult to accomplish) things in order, the next step to gaining more traffic involves link building – which means generating a lot of back-links, meaning links that are on someone else’s site and lead to yours. Google recognizes back-links as one of the biggest key ingredients to ranking a website and the more you have the better your website will rank in Google’s search engine.

So how do you get quality back-links?

Obviously some back-links are worth more weight in Google’s eyes than others. If you’re a beginner in the website industry, then you have probably done your fair share of “how to get back-links” research. There are a ton of good ways to get back-links out there – some work and some don’t. Places people usually start are link directories and article directories, which are always good to have in your link building plan, but will not get you very far unless you pick out some great link directories and do a humongous article directory campaign. Continue reading

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