There are certain brands that I find myself being loyal to – most often because they are consistently producing superior products, and second because they have successfully convinced me that they are good. Adobe is one of those brands I love because they keep putting out awesome products. True, I have a complaint here and there (I know memory is cheap but does Adobe CS really have to fill a dual layer DVD? come on) but on the whole I’m very happy when they come out with new stuff and it tends to inspire me. I’ve been a champion of InDesign since the beginning (mainly because I hate Quark Xpress and any designer who prefers it is clearly thinking WAY inside the box) and spearheaded the change over at every place I’ve worked over the past 10 years since it’s debut. Clearly I backed the right horse because who uses Quark anymore? Dinosaurs.

Anyway, I digress…
What I wanted to tell you about was a very cool new online tool from adobe called Kuler. It is a really great color palette and color scheme picking tool. You can download other peoples palettes that they have saved, or make your own. You can get every color value you could possibly need for print or web, then download your scheme and import it directly into Photoshop, InDesign or Illustrator to use in your design. It’s really fantastic. If you do anything that involves picking color I’d advise checking out Kuler.

oh, and did I mention that it’s free? Yeah, it is. Cool huh?

Here are a few things to consider beyond what you want to say on your blog – I could stand to pay attention to these things as well 🙂

1. Posting Regularly

It’s a good idea to post on a regular basis and even schedule your posts so they go up at the same time each day or each week. This will inspire loyalty amoung your readers because they will get used to seeing your posts and even look forward to them. Another plus to this is that Google will start to recognize that you post at a certain time and you will get indexed faster if you post regularly.

2. Post length

I’d say you’d be doing yourself a favor by being brief, but keeping to a minimum word count of around 250 would be a good target as well. That’s enough for you to get your point across but not so much that it’ll only get skimmed.

3. SEO

Try and think about your keywords and imbed them into your content. This is just good communication skill as well as good SEO – you want your posts to come up high on Google if someone searches for what you are talking about.

4. Promotion

It’s a good idea to promote your blog via facebook, twitter, social bookmarking sites etc etc. Don’t spam people, but it’s perfectly reasonable to post in your status on facebook every once in a while that you have a new blog post and provide a link.

I’ll talk more about promotion and building an audience in a future post, but that should give you something to think about for a few days. Thanks for reading!