Monash Liberals

Do you need a brand identity?

Do you really need a brand?

Do you need to develop a brand identity?If you want sustainable growth in your business and if you want to earn more than what you do today, you must develop a brand identity for you or your business. There is no alternative to this proposition.

At this point, many business owners will step back saying that branding means advertising and thus it would require huge investment. This is a very common situation as a beginner: The business owner do not have much idea about the actual rate of advertising in different media.

What is the basic relationship between advertisement and branding?

For effective branding of your product or company, you must hit the target market with your brand identity, repeatedly. You must make sure that they remember your face (business face) at least when they need you the most. Thus, to achieve this, marketers use advertisement in different formats, such as audio, audio visual or only visual.

Does it mean that you need to invest a huge amount of money in advertising?

It is not necessarily so. To put it simply, advertising cost depends on the size of your target market and the best medium to reach them. You do not necessarily need to invest in expensive billboards or in a full-page newspaper advertisement to reach the target market.

You can easily find some alternatives to reach it. For example, think about branded office stationary gifts, email advertising, mobile advertising or even social media networking. If you think, you can also use your existing subscribers or clients to promote your business and your brand. For example, think about shopping bags and packaging. These advertising media will cost much less than traditional advertisement and may prove more effective if you can use them properly.

Branding is all about giving a relevant face to your business. More importantly, if you do not add a face to your business, the target market will soon develop one for you and you will have almost nothing to do about that. Once an impression is created, it is very tough to replace it with a new one. Thus, you need to consider developing a brand image from the very first day of launching your product.

How to do that?

The first thing you need to do is to create a diagram or flow chart of how you want your product to be perceived by the target market. At the same time, you need to find out other elements like your target market, where they live, how they want your product to be, how your product is different from your competitors’.

You will also need to find out the best way to reach the target market – evaluate different options such as radio or TV advertisement, POS advertisement, newspaper or magazine advertisement, email advertisement etc.

Once you have developed a flow chart of what you want or how you want to develop your brand, draft a branding strategy accordingly. For example, develop an appropriate logo, color scheme (maintain the same color scheme across the product), a tag line to attract your target market etc.

Do not forget to evaluate how people perceive your brand.

General SEO Do’s and Don’ts

Let me tell you WHAT TO DO by telling you WHAT NOT TO DO:

Don’t Ignore Your Audience

Write about topics your audience cares about. Like what? Find out, by conducting a poll (like I did), scan some relevant bulletin boards or forums, look for common topics in customer emails, or do some keyword research. There are great free keyword tools like the Google Keyword Tool or SEO Book’s Keyword Tool and loads more. The plan is not to spend your life doing keyword research but just to get a general idea of what your visitors are interested in.

Don’t Be Dense About Keyword Density

Once you have a topic for readers; help search engines find it. Keyword Density is the number of times a keyword appears in a page compared to the total number of words. You want to make sure your keywords are included in the crucial areas:

• the Title Tag
• the Page URL (friendly URL)
• the Main Heading (H1 or H2)
• the first paragraph of content.
• at least 3 times in the body content (more or less depending on amount of content and if and only if it makes sense).

Most people aim for a keyword density of 2% (i.e. use the keyword 2 times for every 100 words). But what if your keyword phrase is “SEO for Web Designers and Web Developers” how many times can you repeat that before it sounds just plain unnatural? Write for your readers not for search engines. If you follow the tips
in this article you’ll be writing naturally for your readers; which works for the search engines too.

Warning: Do not over fill your page with the same keywords or you might be penalized by search engines for keyword stuffing.

Don’t Ignore Relatives

In this article, it makes sense to mention topics like “keyword research”, “search engine crawlers” and “title tag use”, but what if I mentioned a highly trafficked term like “cell phone plans”… kind of out of context right? So use other keywords and topics that make sense to your audience, the search engine measures keyword relations to determine relevancy too.

• Cars and Tires (yes)
• Web Design and Flying Monkeys (no…well sometimes)

Don’t Be Afraid of Internal Linking

Do you want the search engine to see every page on your website? Help the search engine spider do its job. There should be a page (like a sitemap or
blog archives) that links to all the pages on your site.

Tip: You can promote the more important pages by inserting text links within body content. Make sure you use relevant linking text and avoid using “click here” (as mentioned earlier).

Don’t Ignore Broken Links

You should always search for and fix the broken links on your site. If you’ve removed a page or section, you can use the robot.txt to prevent the spiders crawling and indexing the broken links. If you have moved a page or your entire website, you can use the 301 .htaccess to redirect to a new URL.

Tips: You can use the Google Webmaster Tool to find broken links and your 404 Not Found errors.

Don’t Be Inconsistent With Your Domain URL

To search engines, a www and a non-www URL are considered two different URLs. You should always keep your domain and URL structure consistent. If you start promoting your site without the “www”, stick with it.

Don’t Be Scared of Semantic Coding

Semantic and standard coding not only can make your site cleaner, but it also allows the search engines to read your page better.

Top 9 SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers

1. Splash Page

I’ve seen this mistake many times where people put up just a big banner image and a link “Click here to enter” on their homepage. The worst case — the “enter” link is embedded in the Flash object, which makes it impossible for the spiders to follow the link.

This is fine if you don’t care about what a search engine knows about your site; otherwise, you’re making a BIG mistake. Your homepage is probably your website’s highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow.

Your homepage should include (at minimum) target keywords and links to important pages.

2. Non-spiderable Flash Menus

Many designers make this mistake by using Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. They might look cool to you but they can’t be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.

3. Image and Flash Content

Web spiders are like a text-based browser, they can’t read the text embedded in the graphic image or Flash. Most designers make this mistake by embedding the important content (such as target keywords) in Flash and image.

4. Overuse of Ajax

A lot of developers are trying to impress their visitor by implementing massive Ajax features (particularly for navigation purposes), but did you know that it is a big SEO mistake? Because Ajax content is loaded dynamically, so it is not spiderable or indexable by search engines.

Another disadvantage of Ajax — since the address URL doesn’t reload, your visitor can not send the current page to their friends.

5. Versioning of Theme Design

For some reason, some designers love to version their theme design into sub level folders (ie. domain.com/v2, v3, v4) and redirect to the new folder. Constantly changing the main root location may cause you to lose backlink counts and ranking.

6. “Click Here” Link Anchor Text

You probably see this a lot where people use “Click here” or “Learn more” as the linking text. This is great if you want to be ranked high for “Click Here”. But if you want to tell the search engine that your page is important for a topic, than use that topic/keyword in your link anchor text. It’s much more descriptive (and relevant) to say “learn more about {keyword topic}”

Warning: Don’t use the EXACT same anchor text everywhere on your website. This can sometimes be seen as search engine spam too.

7. Common Title Tag Mistakes

Same or similar title text:
Every page on your site should have a unique <title> tag with the target keywords in it. Many developers make the mistake of having the same or similar title tags throughout the entire site. That’s like telling the search engine that EVERY page on your site refers to the same topic and one isn’t any more unique than the other.

One good example of bad Title Tag use would be the default WordPress theme. In case you didn’t know, the title tag of the default WordPress theme isn’t
that useful: Site Name > Blog Archive > Post Title. Why isn’t this search engine friendly? Because every single blog post will have the same text “Site Name > Blog Archive >” at the beginning of the title tag. If you really want to include the site name in the title tag, it
should be at the end: Post Title | Site Name.

Exceeding the 65 character limit:
Many bloggers write very long post titles. So what? In search engine result pages, your title tag is used as the link heading. You have about 65 characters (including
spaces) to get your message across or risk it getting cutoff.

Keyword stuffing the title:
Another common mistake people tend to make is overfilling the title tag with keywords. Saying the same thing 3 times doesn’t make you more relevant. Keyword stuffing in the Title Tag is looked at as search engine spam (not good). But it might be smart to repeat the same word in different ways:

“Photo Tips & Photography Techniques for Great Pictures”

“Photo” and “Photography” are the same word repeated twice but in different ways because your audience might use either one when performing a search query.

8. Empty Image Alt Attribute

You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. The alt attribute is what describes your image to a blind web user. Guess what? Search engines can’t see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.

Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results. For example, Google image search brings me hundreds of referrals everyday for the search terms “abstract” and “dj“.

9. Unfriendly URLs

Most blog or CMS platforms have a friendly URL feature built-in, however, not every blogger is taking advantage of this. Friendly URL’s are good for both your human audience and the search engines. The URL is also an important spot where your keywords should appear.

Example of Friendly URL: domain.com/page-title
Example of Dynamic URL: domain.com/?p=12356

Why Should You Learn About SEO?

• SEO isn’t only for online marketers. As a web designer or frontend developer, most on-site SEO is your responsibility.
• If your site is not search engine friendly, you might be losing a lot of traffic that you’re not even aware of. Remember, besides visitors typing in “www.yourwebsite.com” and backlink referrals; search engines are the only way people can find your site.
• There are many benefits of getting a high ranking site. Let’s use ndesign-studio.com for example. I have, on average, about 14,000 visitors a day. About 40 – 45% of that traffic comes from search engines (about 6000+ referrals a day). Imagine, without search engine referrals, I would be losing thousands of visitors everyday. That means, I’m risking losing potential clients too.
• SEO is also a value-added service. As a web designer/developer you can sell your SEO skills as an extended service.

How to Write an Essay

Essays are sometimes the most daunting assignments in school (and later on in the professional world). To students, the phrase runs, “You either have it or you don’t.” Writing skills. Some people can take an hour to write a masterpiece, while others slave over a page assignment for weeks.

While they may be terrifying, they are manageable, controllable tasks that anyone can accomplish. There are just a few steps to take and you will find yourself complete with essay in hand and time in the future.

Essays come in many forms: standard Five-Paragraph essay, Compare-Contrast essay, Application essay, Research/Term paper, Essay Exam, and so on. Many teachers and professors will design a specific essay questions for you, that you will then have to answer in their designated fashion.

Regardless of the style, follow the following general steps and you will be able to write an essay of any sort. Writing is not a simple deed. However, as opposed to tests, you will not be forced to memorize data for a single hour. Rather, you can research and formulate your own thoughts, expressing your knowledge in a personal way. This latter example is a major reason many people prefer essays to other forms of factual testing.

1. Read and comprehend the essay topic/question

Reread the question several times to make sure you truly understand what it is asking. People often write an essay that has nothing to do with the topic. Discuss it with your teacher or other students.

2. Research the topic

Go to the library, internet, read some books, look over your notes. Hone in on the specific question at hand and read information pertaining to it.

3. Write an outline

As elementary as it seems sometimes, outlines are the scaffolding for all successful writing. It does not have to be a formal outline, but just sketch out the order of your essay in some method that you understand.

4. Write a thesis statement

The thesis statement is the foundation of your essay. Write that one sentence that argues the point, the debate, the crux of your essay. It will be the final sentence of your introduction and the starting point for the rest of the writing.

5. Write the paper

Just write. It does not have to be a masterpiece as you write that first draft. Just get something on paper that you can eventually mold into a final product.

6. Edit the paper for content

Edit the paper to make sure you are staying on target, following your thesis, and have enough supporting evidence to prove your thesis.

7. Edit the paper for grammar

Give your essay a quick look solely for grammatical problems (spelling, punctuation, transitions, and so on).

8. Have someone else read over the essay

Even the most accomplished writers have editors. Sometimes you can become “immune” to your own writing and are unable to see what makes sense and what does not make sense. Let someone else read over it to make sure that your argument is cohesive.

9. Print the paper

Printers can sometimes distort your paper, no matter how well written. Print it out a day or so in advance in order to take care of any last minute errors.

10. Turn it in!

How to Get a Scholarship

How to Get a Scholarship How to Get a Scholarship

Scholarships are tricky things. Everyone wants one. Few people get them. Apparently, there are millions out there that go unused on an annual basis. Because scholarships differ from loans in that they are free money, they are coveted beautiful things. They are also brilliant resume boosters and look fantastic on any resume.

Now, there are so many types of scholarships, it helps to be abreast of the types, time ranges, amounts, and places to find them. Some high schools give away scholarships prior to attending college. Some scholarships are merit based, others need based, others interest based, other cultural based. The list goes on.

The best way to begin seeking scholarships is to do your research. Every college and university will have a dowry with various scholarships. Usually they will be listed on the school’s website; however, you can always inquire as to their prevalence. When you learn about them, you can find out how much, many, and reasons behind them. Essentially, scholarships don’t usually just get handed to you (although some lucky people do find this fortuitous world). You must do your research.

Here are some types of scholarships.

1. Merit Scholarships

Scholarships typically revolve around this type of award. People who excel in academics are awarded a scholarship on the basis of their overall academic achievement. This may come in the form of top GPA, excellent SAT scores, and so on. These are highly competitive and may come in various forms.

2. Need-Based Scholarships

This type of scholarship is given purely on financial means. They are designed to fund the less-fortunate students in their academic pursuits. Scholarship committees look at various reasons for this hardship: Parents’ income, number of siblings in school simultaneously, expenses, cost of living, etc.

3. Athletic Scholarships

Scholarships are popularly given to star athletes by universities to recruit them for the athletic teams. Many athletes complete their education free of charge, but also pay the price of overworked team sports. Usually full-scholarship athletes are recruited by “scouts” while in high school. You don’t usually pursue this type of scholarship; it is given to you.

4. School-Based Individual Scholarships

Every school offers specific scholarships relevant to specifics from the university: donors, individual name scholarships, personal scholarships, and so on. Sometimes you have to apply directly to the scholarship, and other times, just by being accepted, you are placed in the bowl for possible scholarship awards.

5. Full/Partial Scholarship

Many people look at scholarships as a whole and think that they sometimes cover everything. If you are lucky enough to receive a full scholarship, then yes, they cover living, books, and tuition. However, many scholarships are partial, meaning they may cover simply living, simply books, or part of the tuition. If you are awarded any type of scholarship, take it and run! They are prized, wonderful gifts, and you should feel honored to receive one.

While several scholarships are school based, others are based on almost every other personal element that can exists. Several websites and books are designed purely for the existence of finding scholarships. Here are some websites and books that serve as search agents and listings of all the scholarships that exist. If you try hard enough, you are likely to find at least one or two that match your interests and qualifications. It takes much patience and time, but you are bound to find a scholarship for you.

Biomedical Society

Biomed Society BBQ

Additional Information:
Free food and drink for all members!

Musical Company, Monash University (MUMCo)

MUMCo is thrilled to present Tony Award-winning musical, Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street for their 2008 production. The musical is based on the 19th century fictional character Sweeney Todd, with book by Hugh Wheeler and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

A cruel and bloody comedy tells the story of Sweeney Todd, a Fleet Street barber, who was previously known as Benjamin Barker, who returns from Australia where he has spent fifteen years on false charges. When he learns from Mrs. Lovett (whose meat pies are the worst in London) that his wife poisoned herself after being raped by Judge Turpin (the man who wrongly imprisoned him), and that his daughter is the ward of the same Judge Turpin, he vows revenge.

Sondheim’s musical thriller engulfs the imagination and retreats into the darkness, taking the spectator with it. MUMCo invites you to attend the tale of Sweeney Todd as he embarks on his murderous revenge.

MUMCo was founded in 1966 as the Monash University Light Opera Company (MULOC) and is one of the oldest clubs on campus at Monash University. The club mostly consists of current students at the university; however, anyone is welcome to join. We are focused on producing musicals to the highest standard within our means. At the same time, we place great importance on the social aspect of each production and aim to make every MUMCo experience as fun as possible.