Four Ways to Get a Great Logo on the Cheap

As I launch more and more Web sites, I'm starting to care a bit about making them look nice. Since my artistic skills are about on par with those of my two year old, I've started to enlist professional help. Upon learning that some of the designers I know start at $5,000 for these projects, I knew it was time to get creative.

Here are the best resources that I found:

LogoMaker is a neat online service that gives you tools to do it yourself. Much easier and higher quality than, say, Microsoft Clip Art, but obviously tough to come up with something that's completely original looking. Still, it's fast, you can play with it for free, and if you like your creation, it's yours for only $49.

Rent-a-Coder is hands-down the most effective marketplace for small, outsourced projects. I absolutely love it and have gotten to the point I'll post projects that take 30 minutes and cost five bucks. The key to success with RAC is that you need to be crystal clear in communicating what you want, and follow up regularly. Even though your coder may be half a world away, you still need to manage them as you would any other contractor. Rates will probably be between $10 and $100, depending upon the quality that you are looking for and you can get something workable in as little as two days.

Digital Point is a huge and generally good quality forum for Web marketers. The Contest directory is a fantastic and fun place to solicit designs from multiple designers. Again, you need to be clear about what you want and provide feedback as the designs come in to help guide direction. Prize money of $100 usually draws a good number of entrants, and I find that a $10 consolation prize really gets boosts participation. One caveat: since the designers don't know if they will get paid, it can be challenging to manage them once you get down to those detailed refinements.

LogoWorks leads the pack in terms of professionalism. They are all about logos (and other designs) and structure their process in the same way that an advertising agency does. Very best tools for management and feedback available online, which are really critical if you are going for a higher quailty design. They tap 2 or more designers to provide unique comps to you, then you pick the one you like and work with its designer on revisions. LogoWorks is the priciest of the bunch, starting at $250 and climbing from there as you include more designers and design optoins.

Alexa is Just Silly

Surely you've been to www.bamming.com, right? According to Alexa, it just cracked the ranks of the top 1 million sites, ranking 977,794. You'll probably see it on the Movers and Shakers list sometime soon.

Thing is, Bamming has precisely one visitor: me. One more small piece of evidence about how unreliable Alexa rankings are.

StumbleUpon is Falling Down

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve had fun whittling away time playing with StumbleUpon and I’ve met at least one CEO who credits them with spring-boarding her company to the big time. I don’t hate them; I just think their business modeled is doomed. And besides, haven’t we already tried this before?

Here are five reasons why StumbleUpon is doomed to fail:

1. The traffic they send is pretty worthless. We’ve gotten over 32,000 visitors from StumbleUpon in the past six months to a variety of sites. Zero ad clicks, Zero sales, Zero dollars. These lookie loos don’t even browse around, as just 0.64% click to a second page!
   
2. Traffic is too expensive. Campaigns start a nickel per visitor, which equates to a $50 CPM. For a penny or two more, you can get much more highly targeted visitors (who actually convert) via paid search. There are plenty of other sources that will deliver the same quality of traffic for 80% - 90% less, too.
   
3. Ad buys have a very looooong tail. Two weeks ago, we bought a $50 test campaign from StumbleUpon, which was supposed to send 250 visitors per day our way over a four day period. During the course of that campaign, over 30 of those paid visitors gave us thumbs up. Because of that, we’re now receiving an average of 350 organic visitors per day since the campaign ended. Paid StumbleUpon campaigns seem to be a good way to prime the pump, but there is no reason to keep spending once the site has been rated.
   
4. Cheating is easy. People are openly trading stumbles on DigitalPoint, which may actually even be within StumbleUpon’s terms of service. Meanwhile, organized cheat sites like StumbleXchange are growing like crazy.
5. They lack polish. No credit cards accepted, no ability to generate meaningful reports, no conversion tracking and an opaque and confusing ad approval process. They fall way short of the minimum acceptable functionaility that advertisers expect.

There may be another method for StumbleUpon to monetize its popularity (interstitials?), but their current business strategy seems doomed to fail.