Tips for Student Designers and the Small Businesses Who Love Them: OrangeSlyce Life

A few weeks ago, we wrote a little bit about how Twitter is changing advertising.  We suggested that businesses get a Twitter page, but we left you all hanging–we didn’t tell you how to do it.  Social Media platforms are a potentially effective tool, but, like any tool, you don’t get much out of them if you don’t know how to use them.  With that in mind, here are some guidelines that will make your Twitter page pop.

1: Figure out your audience

Unless you’re already famous and loved, you’re not going to be very effective if you can’t nail down a target audience.  You should have answers to each of these questions:  What customer base are you trying to reach?  How old are they?  Are they predominantly male, female, or neither?  What sort of groups do they run in?  Do they appreciate formality?

2: Design an appealing background that fits your brand

It’s shocking how many supposedly professional twitter pages either skip this step of put in some bare minimal effort.  We’re talking about the public face of your business–you can not afford to mail this in with a design that either looks crappy or does a poor job of conveying the message you want it to convey about your business.

If you’ve covered Step 1, you should already have some idea of what you want your background to look like.  If you still need help from there, we’d honestly suggest hiring a designer to help you out.  It won’t cost you very much–pardon the plug, but on OrangeSlyce.com you can easily hire a qualified student to design your twitter background for about a hundred bucks–and it will save you the time and hassle of trying to get everything “just so” by yourself. 

Ed. Note: We’re actually taking this exact route with our own Twitter background right now, because our current one is a little too stodgy.  So if you look at our Twitter page in a week or so and it looks nice, then you’ll know we gave you good advice.

3: Reach out to your audience

Everyone wants to know how to get followers.  The only long-term answer is by providing interesting content, but you can still prime the pump a little bit.  Think about the sort of groups your target audience belongs too, and the sort of profiles that they might follow.

Follow popular users (and maybe dig through their followers and follow some of those followers).  Just don’t go crazy following people, for two reasons: Twitter frowns on that (and has been known to suspend or delete accounts for excessive follower churn).  Besides, nothing screams “spammer” like a profile that’s followed 1000 people and only had 20 followers.

4:Be Human (not a spammer)

People who use twitter (at least the ones who actively use it) are generally a savvy bunch when it comes to spammers.  This is because seemingly 60% of Twitter profiles (and like 80% of the people who will follow you) are spam bots designed to peddle shady wares.  People are going to be understandably skeptical of your businesses’ Twitter page–your job is to convince them that you’re for real.

The way you do that is by being human.  Don’t just bombard your followers with links or advertisements, talk about your experiences, lessons you’ve learned, and funny thoughts you’ve had.  In short, write things that your target audience might find interesting.

If you want more help on writing interesting content, check out this post on getting retweeted over at TwitterTips.

5: Be thankful

On your Twitter’s homepage, you’ll see a link along the right side that says “@(YourUsername).”  Click this link, and you’ll be shown all of the tweets that people have directed at you.  Reply to these, whenever possible, and thank people (either as a tweet or as a direct message) whenever possible.

6: Retweet other people’s content from time to time

If someone tweets something that might be interesting or useful to your audience, you should absolutely retweet it.  First, because it provides value to your users.  Second, because it’s the nice thing to do.  Still not convinced?  Then just think of it as a means of building political capital with those people.  They’re a lot more likely to retweet something you post if you’ve done the same for them.

7: Remember you’re still writing for your business

It can be easy to get carried away with Twitter.  Before you post anything, ask yourself “am I putting on a good  face for the business?”  We’re not advocating that you go into a shell (far from it!) but we’re also not advocating that you share too much.  Did you have a great time at a local restaurant last night?  Tell people about it.  Did you have a really great time at a local night club last night?  Keep that one to yourself.

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Part of freelance work is flexibility and being able to negotiate the price you charge your client will broaden your opportunities.  However, when going into a price or salary negotiation, it is important to know about what you’re negotiating so you don’t get taken advantage of.

Do your market research
Finding out what the going rate for similar work or jobs should be your first task.  Using the salary wizard at Salary.com, I was able to find the median salary for a junior web designer in Phoenix, AZ was $48,000.  Another research tip is to find other artists and designers and ask what they charge.  Ask how flexible they can be on price.  Get an idea of where you can fit in the market.

Negotiating tactics
Negotiation is an art itself.  Good negotiators are hard to come by so even if all you learn is how to haggle, you’ll have come away from this post with something.

Price is nothing more than a mind trick in most cases.  This is articulated by the phenomenon known as the Anchoring Effect.  I definitely recommend reading the article in depth, but to summarize, whoever names the first price is in the driver’s seat.  No matter how much you negotiate, the first price quoted is the price both parties will subconsciously use to determine who got the better end of the bargain.

Ramit Sethi from I Will Teach You To Be Rich, has excellent posts on how to negotiate – everything from negotiating bank fees, car insurance, cell phones and most importantly – salary.

And to completely round out your negotiating skills, learn from the masters of the art, the ultimate hagglers – rickshaw drivers.

Improve your skills
Using the market research you’ve collected and the negotiating skills you’ve learned, you can increase your income, but there’s nothing like a quality education that will boost your earnings potential.  Having a degree or certification is a key bargaining tool that you can use during your negotiation process and no amount of jedi mind tricks will have the same effect as a degree.

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In any project work–whether you’re a designer or a small business owner–you should absolutely commit what you expect out of the project to paper.  Writing contracts is difficult, and we’d advise seeking the help of an attorney.  Of course, we’re also realists: lawyers are expensive, and it’s highly feasible that you can’t afford one for every project you do.  Even still,  you should still be agreeing to some key terms with the other party.  Today we’re going to talk about one of those key terms: Who keeps the copyright?

In cases of things like logo design, it’s pretty critical for a business to own the copyright as a means of protecting its identity and its brand.  Designers, of course, also have reasons to want to retain a copyright–such as the ability to use prior works as a template.

There are two basic solutions to this question.

1) The designer assigns the copyright to the business

Essentially, this means that the designer sells the rights to the work to the business.  The business, in effect, becomes the copyright holder.

For this to happen, the assignment agreement (including any limitations) must be committed to writing.

2) The designer grants a license to the business

In essence, this grants the business permission to use the design, but no copyright.  After that, things get a bit more complicated; and if you go this route, there are a lot of questions to be answered (eg: is the license exclusive or non-exclusive, is the license revocable or irrevocable, is the license limited or perpetual, etc).  While certain types of licenses can effectively exist without any written agreement, it’s probably wise for both parties to put their agreement in writing*.

*Understand that we say this as people versed in the freelance business, not the law.  We’re giving business advice, not legal advice: if you really want legal advice, your best bet, as always, is to talk to a lawyer.

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Our eye was caught today by an excellent post over at logoblog on the warning signs that a client isn’t going to pay for a logo.  While the piece is obviously useful to designers, there’s a lesson in there for business owners, too: don’t do these things.

1) Don’t take days to return phone-calls

You know this already, but in case you don’t: it’s unprofessional to leave anyone hanging for days at a time. We know that running a business is hectic: you’re wearing a lot of hats and (if you’re doing it right) you’re spreading yourself thin sometimes.  That said, your logo design is important (so is your reputation as a legitimate business, for that matter).  Find enough time to make sure the designer you’re working with knows that you’re still alive and ready to work with them.

2) Don’t continuously mock the designer’s work

Criticism is good–it’s how you help the designer make something you want.  But you should never just outright mock the designers’ work.  Mocking:

• Makes you look like a jerk.  You never know who else that designer knows, and establishing a reputation as a jerk won’t help you get your business off the ground.
• Dampens the designers’ enthusiasm for your project and reduces your chance of getting a good design.  Yes, you pay them to be professional even if you’re mean to them.  No, they’re not robots.  Making fun of your designer is a great way to offend them and make them hate doing work for you.
• Accomplishes absolutely nothing positive for your business.  Your singular focus as a small business needs to be making your business succeed.  It can’t be about you, your ego, your feelings or anything else (if it is, you will fail). It doesn’t matter if you’re frustrated by the designers’ output.  Mocking doesn’t solve that problem, so hold it in (and don’t do it to get laughs either–those laughs won’t add one penny to your bottom line).

Instead of mocking, stick to constructive criticism.  If that doesn’t work, move on. Be professional and tell your designer outright that things aren’t working out.  Don’t waste her time (and yours!) by passive-aggressively mocking work that you’re not satisfied with.

3) Don’t Try to Stiff Your Designer

As a small business, you live and die by your reputation.  We doubt that we need to tell this to anyone reading our site, but just for the sake of completion: don’t try to weasel out of paying somebody whom you agreed to pay.  There are obviously situations that complicate this rule (and how you handle those “shades of gray” is another matter for another day).  But the basic principle is sound: don’t try to worm out of paying your designer for work that you agreed to pay for.

Don’t be that business that takes a designers’ work, “alters” it slightly, and then refuses to pay the designer because you “went in a different direction.”  It might seem like a clever way to save a couple hundred bucks, but the risk you take greatly outweighs the reward.  We’re not talking about your conscience (although we hope that would be enough to keep you from stealing) we’re talking about your businesses’ reputation.

Remember: a major corporation can afford to launch a PR blitz when they get caught doing something slimy; your business can’t.  So be the good guy–it’s the better long-term investment.

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Yesterday, we posted a tidy little piece on networking.  That piece was, of course, only scraping the surface of what we hope will eventually become a networking guide from which every member of the OrangeSlyce community can benefit.   Today, we’re talking about the aspect of networking that stops the painfully shy dead in their tracks: introducing yourself.

We called this post networking for introverts for one big reason: introducing yourself is obviously a much more daunting task for the painfully shy.  But, as we said yesterday, it’s a step that even the painfully shy can easily overcome with a little work and a lot of willpower.  If you find your palms getting clammy and your throat swelling up every time you’re at a mixer, here are a few handy tips you can follow to overcome yourself.

1) Think of other people as friends

One thing that makes it hard to break the ice is that you don’t know how well you’ll be received by the other person.  People tend to be very tribal by instinct, and it can be hard to just walk up to a person from an unfamiliar “tribe” (this, by the way, is also why you sometimes find yourself occasionally hating on groups of people you don’t even know when you’re out in public).  When it comes to approaching these people, you worry (on some level) that your encroachment won’t be well-received, that the other person will be annoyed by your presence (or worse).  If you start worrying about this, ask yourself: why?  Are you ever deeply bothered by a person introducing themselves to you?  Of course not; the other person will almost certainly enjoy the company.

Remember that networking is mutually beneficial.  Just about any person that’s worth networking with will at least spare you a smile and a business card if you introduce themselves to you–they have nothing to gain by not being friendly and everything to lose.  Because of this, the people you want to network with are, to borrow a phrase, just friends you haven’t met.  Don’t be afraid to go meet them.

2) Realize that a lot of the other people in the room are just as nervous as you are

This study by Lauren Bryant at Indiana University suggests that about 40% of adults feel shy.  Keep in mind the fact that surveys almost always under-report undesirable qualities (in other words: some people are too shy to admit that they’re shy) and it’s feasible that around half of the adult population is shy.  Chances are there are that a lot of the people you might network in are in the exact same boat that you are.  Wouldn’t you like it if someone kind walked up to you and took the first step?  Imagine how endearing that would be to you when you’re trying to work up the nerve to introduce yourself, and then be that person for someone else in the room.

3) Have some open-ended questions prepared in advance

Another thing people often worry about when networking is making conversation.  “What happens” you wonder “if I introoduce myself and then we have nothing to talk about?  Awwwwkwaaaaaard!”  Fortunate ly, first impressions rarely require you to hold intimate conversations.  All you’re really trying to do is show the other person that you’re interested in getting to know them better (and not just using them as a means to an end–this is an important point that deserve its own post) and taking the steps necessary to do that.  As such, it’s important that you have a few questions to ask them.  These questions should not be yes or no; you want to bring the other person out of their shell a little bit.  Don’t just ask the person what she does, ask her how she got into it, ask her what she did before that. If you ask her if she likes doing what she does, follow that question up with “what do you love (or hate) about it?”

4) Smile!

Sorry, we know it’s cheesy, but a good smile is important.  Smiling is your way of telling someone from a rival “tribe” that you’re not a threat.  It’s also very hard not to smile back when somebody smiles at you, which is good, because it will be a lot easier for you to approach someone when they’re smiling too.  Stay professional, but be friendly (and, as we said yesterday, be yourself) and you’ll be well on your way to being the networker you want to be.

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One thing that we hate to hear people say is “I just don’t have the personality to be a good networker”  Perhaps it’s because we’ve had our own bouts with shyness, but it drives us crazy to see people resign themselves to failure without even trying to overcome their shortcomings.  We love every last person who’s kind enough to follow our writings, so consider this tough love: saying you can’t be a good networker is almost always an excuse people use because they’re too afraid and too lazy to try.  Here’s another harsh truth: no matter what job you hope to get or what business you’re trying to get off the ground, you’re not in good shape if you aren’t willing to network.  Fortunately, there’s one more truth: great networking is not about being the most outgoing guy or girl in the room.

In truth, great networking has surprisingly little to do with being extroverted.  Sure, it’s a lot harder to take the first step in networking (reaching out to a person and introducing yourself) if you’re naturally shy.  But, unless you’re suffering from a legitimate psychological condition, reaching out to a person is still a hurdle that can easily be cleared.  As with most things, great networking is not about how you star; it’s about how you finish.

We recently read an excellent post on networking by Amanda Collins over at The Grammar Doctors.  While the whole piece is worth your time, there was one part in particular that stuck out to us:

The likelihood that you’ll score a client or referral partner after attending anything once is pretty low. You need to continue making an appearance, connecting with people, and being consistent. Be patient. It may take a number of weeks or months to create relationships and generate sales.

Ultimately, networking is about that creation of relationships.  The first impression is important, but relationships aren’t built on the first impression nearly as much as the second and third and fourth impressions.  Because of that, great networking is about following up on that first impression.  It’s about showing the other person how ambitious you are, and how serious you are about business.  Perhaps more importantly, it’s about letting the other person get to know you, and trust you, and like you.  You don’t have to be extroverted to do any of these things.  Ultimately, all you should really have to be is yourself (unless you’re lazy or sociopathic).  In the coming weeks, we’ll be putting up a few posts that will help you build a network by introducing people to the great person you know you are.

In the meantime, if that ending was a little too sweet for you, please feel free to cleanse the palate with this stock footage of atomic bomb testings:

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Finding a good logo designer is easier than ever in the internet age, but picking that designer out of a crowd can be tough if you don’t have a lot of expertise.  After all, if you knew a ton about logo design, you probably wouldn’t need to hire a logo designer in the first place!  As daunting as finding (and working with) the right designer might  seem, there are a few basic lessons that can help you seperate the proverbial wheat from the metaphorical chaffe.  In today’s lesson, we’re going to talk about knowing what you want in a logo in the first place.

While this lesson may seem pretty clear-cut, it’s arguably the biggest pitfall that you have to overcome.  Knowing what you want in a logo isn’t quite as simple as you might think.  Fortunately, there are some simple, easy to learn guidelines that can get you started.

It’s not critical to know exactly what you want in a logo–again, you’re hiring a designer for their expertise–but knowing the basics will help you work with your designer to get a great result.  Before you even start thinking about what you’re looking for, we strongly recommend reading this article by David Airey. Airey lays down the five critical guidelines that every great logo should follow. As he explains:

Iconic logos are:
1.Describable
2.Memorable
3.Effective without colour
4.Scalable i.e. work when just an inch in size
5.Relevant to the industry in question

There are two items we’d add to this list.  The first thing that we’d add–as sort of a logical conclusion to the five points–is that simplicity is your friend.  If your logo is a complicated piece, it will be difficult for your audience to describe (and, by extension, remember) it will be difficult to scale, and, in all likelihood, it will lose its effectiveness without color.

The next point we’d add is that a good logo should be something you can love.    At the end of the day, any small business is going to live and die with the decisions that its owner makes. You don’t want to be overcritical, you don’t want to be paralyzed by perfectionism, but you also don’t want to represent your business (and, by extension,  yourself) with a logo that you hate.

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