Online Business Blog — erica.biz — Erica Douglass teaches you how to start and grow an online business!

When it comes to getting a logo designed, you have a lot of choices. Should you hire someone you know personally? Someone another company recommended? Or should you try a site where you can offer a logo “contest” and pay the winner for a logo?

I’ve used several different options to get logos throughout the years:

1. I’ve designed a logo myself.
2. I’ve hired a designer I knew personally.
3. I’ve hired a logo design company.
4. And, most recently, I’ve outsourced logo creation through both 99designs and Design Outpost.

In this post, I will run through each of the above four options in detail, and suggest the best course of action for getting you a great logo design at a low price–based on my own experience. (more…)

If you have a website, or a blog, and you want more traffic to it, please read this post carefully.

I bought erica.biz and moved my blog over to it in December 2007. At the time, I had negligible traffic and only 70 subscribers–mostly my real-life friends.

By December 2009, two short years later, I was getting over 15,000 visitors a month from Google alone–and over 30,000 unique visitors a month total.

Now, I’m going to show you exactly how to do the same thing–get a massive wave of traffic and visitors to your blog or website–for far less than you would pay for pay-per-click advertising! (more…)

This is a guest article by Flexo from Consumerism Commentary. Flexo is currently on a ten-day, ten-venue tour.

The harder you try to succeed, the more failures you will accumulate. Here’s my story:

Flexo’s Failure

I enjoy performing in stage plays, and a play was the scene of one of my failures. I’ve always been the last actor to memorize my lines in the script, being “on book” usually through the final rehearsals before the first performance. My lack of preparedness finally caught up to me while in mid-performance my recurring dream came true: I forgot my lines. (more…)

Don’t enjoy cleaning your house, cooking,
or mowing your lawn? How to outsource
boring jobs in five easy steps.
If you haven’t outsourced something like cooking or cleaning yet, and you’re still doing boring drudge work in your everyday life, read on. In one week or less, you will free up 10+ hours of your time every week to do what you love! (more…)

It’s time to recap my 2009 goals and set some really big ones for 2010. Read on to find out how I did on my 2009 goals, and then for a big announcement that you will see me unveil in 2010! (more…)