Recently I had a chance to team up with Angie Pascale on a post about guest blogging. Angie did the hard part (the writing), I provided the visual support (illustration). You can see the post here.
Angie’s the social media director at Location3 Media. She writes about social media, SEO, paid media, and digital marketing for her company blog and a number of other sites, including ClickZ. And she’s as nice as she is knowledgeable.
Guest blogging is more complex than you might think. It has a dark side. Matt Cutts, Google’s top spam fighter, recently concluded that many guest posts are, in fact, spam, written only to boost the page rank of the contributor’s site. Google has taken steps to penalize such posts.
Done in the proper spirit, however, guest posts are a force for good: a chance to share knowledge, demonstrate competence, attract attention (“brand awareness”), and, ideally, pick up new followers.
My illustration showed Matt Cutts manning a roadblock, and a guest blogger choosing
the “true path.”
My original rough sketch just showed a fork in the road. Angie suggested making the left side dark and dreary, and the right side bright and sunny– which gave the illo a lot more punch and visual appeal.
Here’s a detail image:
How good is the caricature? Here are a couple of pictures of Mr. Cutts. He seems to like white tee-shirts.
I got a kick out of mimicking the Google logo and colors. I used the Calluna font, which provides a fair approximation.
Colored letters can be hard to read, however. Can you see a difference in the two signs below? The sign on the right has darker letters. You can see it most clearly in the blue letters.
I used a very simple Photoshop trick to darken the letters: I simply duplicated the text layers, set the layer mode to Color Burn, and adjusted the opacity slider until I liked the result.
I had great fun working with Angie, and I certainly learned a lot.
If you’re interested in the relationship between social media and marketing, and the intricacies of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you might want to follow Angie
on Twitter.
Here’s the final again:
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Have you ever done a guest post to build awareness for your brand and services?
Have you ever decided to follow someone after reading their guest post on a blog?
When’s the last time you strolled down a path lined with skulls and bones? Did you whistle??
Hope you’ll leave a comment.
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