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Become a Logo Maker and Internet Branding Expert with these Insider Tips
On this page, I'll help you develop skills to become a logo maker, and show you how to use those skills to create a professional internet branding presence for your new business. Developing an "image" and logo for your new business is something that helps you stand out from the crowd and makes it MUCH easier for people to remember you. Instead of being a nobody on the net or offline, you become a brand. The process of internet branding and offline branding as well, revolves around two things that I'm going to try to help you with. These are: 1. Help you develop a logo for your business. 2. Help you think of a slogan to partner with it. The best way for me to help you achieve the above and turn you into a successful logo maker and internet branding expert, is to relate the process of developing a logo and a slogan to how I personally did it. That way I can give you simple, honest and friendly advice. Having done that and, along the way, helped you with the essential brainstorming for your internet branding and logo maker skills, I will provide tools to make it an absolute breeze to get the design work done. I recommend that you read on, but if you're busy and just want access to the logo maker tools that I recommend, then you can click the link below right now... 
OK, if you're still here with me, let's get cracking... Way back in 1981 I set-up a music teaching business, which has now become a huge franchised rockschool business with over 60 outlets (mostly in the UK). If you're interested then you can visit
Clive's Easylearn Rockschools
In my first year of teaching, I built my business up from nothing to earning $800 a week, which was a good amount back then and much more than any of my friends were earning doing their mundane day jobs - and I was just 21 at the time. And I did all this without any real premises cost from a spare bedroom in my mother's suburban bungalow.
Logo Ideas and Internet Branding Starting Points
Right from the start, I knew that I had to develop skills as a logo maker and a slogan to stand out from all the other local music teachers that I had to compete with. Let me discuss a few of the branding-related and logo things that helped me back then, and how you can replicate them to help you right now whether you want to work offline or develop internet branding and logo.If you're running an offline business from home, then this is a good starting point... First off, outside the front door, I had a small brass plaque made with my business name and what I did engraved on it. Mine read: The Sound Workshop Music Lessons You can use your own name and, of course, if you have any relevant qualifications, you can have these engraved on the plaque too. I didn't - and I still did spectacularly well. The plaque, which needs to kept clean and shiny, has the effect of doing two useful things: 1. It confirms for first time visitors that they have arrived at the right place. 2. It ensures that you are perceived as a professional immediately - brass plaques connote "professional" as they're used outside doctors, lawyers, dentists etc. I recommend that it's one of the first things you buy for your new offline business as its money well spent. However, before you can go ahead and do that, you need to decide whether you are going to call the business by your own name, or make up a business name and develop logo maker skills to create a design. Right from the start, I went the business name route and came up with the name "The Sound Workshop". I decided to do this because I had future plans to do more than teach guitar - I wanted to be able to offer recording services, teach a range of instruments, and perhaps even employ other people over time. In short, offer anything and everything to do with sound. I ended up doing all this and much more, and wound up with a multi million dollar teaching network. The only problem with creating a business name, (which is the very start of an internet branding strategy) is that it can make you sound a bit too impersonal when someone looks at your advert. With this in mind, after a while, I changed my business name to "Clive's Music Room" and then finally, when I got staff, premises and began developing the franchise network, "Clive's Easylearn Pop Music Schools". I found that parents in particular like the "friendly feel" of the fact that the business still used my first name. (Friendly note: Please take my ideas, but don't outright copy my business name and trademarks. They are, of course, protected).
Developing a Niche Name for your Business -
And Making it Your USP!
A word similar to my "easylearn" one is well worth thinking up, as this points to what your unique selling point (USP) or "niche" is, and will be a useful starting point in the development of your logo maker skills that I'll move onto in a moment. My USP has always been teaching people who have never played before, how to get into music and rock out in a band, in the easiest, fastest way possible. Yours may be quite different, but it's something that you need to carefully consider, and if you can build it into your business name or slogan, then so much the better.
The Value of a Logo, and Why You Need to Become a Logo Maker to Succeed...
I soon became a logo maker, and you can see my later Clive's Easylearn Pop Music Schools logo in action in the photo above. Can you see how valuable it is? Without that logo in place, it would be just another gig. However, the logo "brands" the event and makes it a "Clive's Live" kids show as we call it, and the more that people see a logo like this, the more they THINK they know the business, and the more easily it comes to mind when they are searching for music lessons. Becoming a good logo maker is absolutely fundamental to developing any internet branding strategy.
Take This The Five Minute Logo Maker Tutorial To Help Your Business Become an Internet Branding Success
Whilst the business name alone works absolutely fine for the brass plaque outside, for things like adverts and flyers, you need to be thinking about creating your own logo and short slogan. Once you have a logo, then you have the makings of a brand, and perhaps rather curiously, people trust brands much more than individuals. Logo maker skills are thus essential.I remember all those years ago, having fun with a sketchbook, scribbling down lots of ideas for logos and slogans, and using color pencils to test different color combinations. The whole thing took several enjoyable weeks, and I tested the ideas and color choices on a number of people. I had a young wife to help me - she's always been, and continues to be, all these years later - absolutely great for bouncing ideas off, and although she's not musical, she's come up with some of the best ideas for our teaching empire - ideas that have, over the years made us millions of dollars. I mention this because it would be a good idea if you had someone you could trust that you could similarly bounce ideas off too! So, you need a logo that encompasses what you do in the fewest words and design flourishes possible, and ideally one that can be reproduced easily and cheaply in a variety of different media - something that looks equally striking in color and black and white, and in big and really small sizes too.
Here's What You Need to Know....
OK, here's the five minute tutorial that will teach you pretty much all you need to know to hone you skills as a logo maker (and further down the page I'll give you a link to a bit of software that makes the design side of things super-easy).Let me share with you what I did, just to start getting you thinking about you own situation. First off I recognized, by looking at a whole bunch of adverts and logos in and around my hometown, that many had a "pre-processing" word attached to them, and they really made a big impact. Let me explain what I mean. We've all got short attention spans in this fast-paced modern world, and there's always a ton of things competing for our attention at any one time. Consider seeing this sign (written with a fancy logo and colors) downtown, pointing down a sidestreet during your lunch-break.... Brezillo's What does that tell you? Nothing much. Do you give it a second thought or bother to see what it is? Probably not. However, what if Brezillo's had put one big word ABOVE their business name. What if they'd put this... HUNGRY?
Brezillo's That's a huge difference, and what if Brezillo's also had a slogan underneath, maybe something like "Super sandwiches made super fast" Now the sign looks like this... HUNGRY?
Brezillo's
Super sandwiches, super fast! What a difference! What a completely different impact from that same little advertising space, and what a huge increase in custom from hungry office workers without much time on their dinner breaks! Okay, so I started noticing stuff like this, and with a bit of research, found out that the "pre-processing" word - "hungry" in the example above, works best if it actually becomes an integral part of the logo itself, and is always at the top. With this in mind, I went back to my music business idea. This was the point that I changed it from "The Sound Workshop". The first thing - did was choose a processing word. It was easy, I chose "tuition". I was bit wary at first, because it was unclear of what I was giving tuition in, so I made sure that the new business name had the word "music" in it. - I got to this: TUITION?
Clive's Music Room Note the ? After the pre-processing word. The perceived wisdom is that it makes the viewer actually consider the word in their own lives and not just read it. "Tuition" is just a statement; an advert. "Tuition?" On the other hand is a question to think about and consider - "do I want tuition?" "Could one of my kids use that service?" It's a BIG difference, and that's why the word has to be BIG too, right across the top of your logo. It feels awful, grafting some huge word onto the top of a carefully-crafted logo, sorta ruins it's appearance, but with branding, it's not about appearances, it's about sales!! Well, with the first two bits if the jigsaw in place, it was time to think about the slogan. So many of these slogans that we always see are vague and often empty and meaningless. What is needed is something that focuses like a laser beam on your unique selling point (or USP as I'll refer to it from now on). Brezillo's wanted to capture the hungry, short-of-time office worker, so they said "Super sandwiches, super fast." It said it all perfectly... We make really good sandwiches, and we do it really quickly so you won't have to waste much of your precious dinner hour. As I've already mentioned, my musical niche was that I was going after people who were beginners and wanted the whole experience to be easy, so I came up with the catchy but meaningful slogan "The EASY way to play". This completed the picture. Now I had: TUITION?
Clive's Music Room
"The EASY way to play" It said everything: here was somewhere to get tuition. It was clearly tuition in music, and here was a place that made the whole complicated process easy. If I'd just said "Clive's Music Room" I could easily have been perceived as a shop selling instruments, which would have been no good. With the pre-processing word and the slogan underneath, it made a lot more sense. I could have added "the easy way to play guitar" to the end of the slogan, but didn't because I was teaching a range of rock instruments. I could have also added to the pre-processing and said "rock tuition" but I prefer the single word.
The final part of my particular jigsaw was the logo design itself, and how to make the words as meaningful as possible when seen in an advert. My wife Mandy and I thought about this for ages, and scribbled away in our sketchbook. In the end, one of us (I can't remember which all these years later) came up with the idea of making the logo look like a blackboard. It was a typical thing that comes to mind when thinking of a school, and it would also work in black and white if need be, and therefore be cheap to print. The contrast would be high between the black background and the white letters on it, so it would look clear if printed very small, and we could use a handwritten style of font to give it a friendly feel, which was re-inforced by the use of my first name in the logo.
The Hands-Down Best Way to Design and Create Your Logo... Even if You Have NO Previous Design Skills
These days you don't need a sketchbook, it can all be done using your laptop online and I've found you EXACTLY the right tool for this enjoyable job. It's called "LogoMaker" and there's a link to it coming up below. It will enable you to test loads of different ideas, add graphics, slogan and move it all around until it looks just right, and the whole of this process is FREE. Once you finish your logo, then you can download it from the system in every sort of format you'd ever need for, at the time of writing a mere $49. It is is an absolute bargain - and it's tremendous fun to use too!So, what I recommend you What do now is spend a few days online with "LogoMaker"scribbling ideas for your own logo, using the techniques presented here, and develop something that works for you. Click the link below to get started right away... 
IMPORTANT NOTE: The logos and slogan discussed in this archive are owned by Clive Brooks, his companies and associates, and as such are legally protected across various territories. Please do not copy them or pass them off as your own. They are kindly loaned and used used in good faith to provide you with starting ideas.
If You Want Someone Else To Design Your Logo, Then This Is The BEST Way By Far...
If you just don't feel up to designing your own logo, and would rather leave it to the professionals, then what I'm about to share with you is the hand-down best possible way to do that.The concept is simple and quite unique, and it works like this. 1. You go to a website and complete a form detailing the sort of logo you're looking for. In effect, it's a design brief. 2. Lots of Designers submit their logo ideas for your job on the site, and you can comment on each one and suggest amendments. 3. Select the one you want, pay a set fee (which is significantly less than hiring a designer in the normal way) and download your logo files. You can see exactly how it works right now, by simply clicking the link below, and you can even see the progress of other logo jobs currently being worked on, so that you'll know the sort of thing that the designers can do. There are some very talented designers producing some creative and unique work. Here's the link... 
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