Creating & Diversifying Cookie Content (and trying to look/sound professional while doing so...)

It's a digital jungle out here, full of online advertising, search engine optimization, web traffic/analytics, free trials and expensive premium upgrades. If you don't know what you're doing as a content creator, the digital ocean you're attempting to stay afloat in will sweep you away in it's undertow. So learning and navigating this unfamiliar frontier these past few months has been challenging to say the least. I kept at it though, because I knew one thing beyond all others: my wife could bake her ass off. So I knew I needed to work my ass off to pull my weight and showcase her art and our company to the online world. I figured there may be others out there trying to get a fledgling business off the ground, so I figured I would share a bit of my process for getting here.

Once we decided to get our sugar cookie business up and running, I knew that instagram would be our best forum to display our cookies, as it's primarily photo based. So we created a business instagram account, and in doing so, quickly realized we were lacking some basic business fundamentals; a logo, a website, an email address etc... Like I said earlier, the more you learn, the more there is to learn. So I created a free email account through gmail, added it to our instagram page, then went over to facebook and created a business page there as well. They are both owned by Meta so they work nicely together. I've been using the Meta Business Suite to manage both instagram and facebook simultaneously. It has some bugs but overall it's a solid hub to track messages, posts and analytics.

Now that I had the business pages up, I realized they looked pretty crappy with no logo or branding. I had an idea in my head for what I wanted in regards to logo (a circular cookie with our company name written around it in icing-style cursive), but I had ZERO experience with Photoshop or programs like it, so I knew I would have to seek help from a professional. After doing a bit of research, I settled on fiverr.com, which is essentially an online marketplace for graphic design. You can browse through the different designer's portfolios and pricing, and settle on someone that meets your style and budget. Prices range from dirt cheap to beyond expensive, so you'll be able to find something in your price range. After a fair bit of due diligence, I hired someone in the UK named Gemma who had great reviews and a portfolio that had the look I was going for.

Collaborating with Gemma on our logo was such a rewarding experience. She really was able to work with me to bring my vision (and crappy sketch) to life. After a couple of revisions, Gemma delivered our masterpiece! Logo design can get expensive so I would suggest heading over to fiverr.com to seek assistance. Check out Gemma's portfolio, she is GREAT! Having a logo really made us feel like a company, and it also gave us our company color scheme. We utilized 3 colors from our logo as our primary, secondary, and tertiary brand colors respectively. A quick note about colors on the internet you might not know (I didn't!); Every color on the internet has a universal code. It ensures that your colors remain consistent across different online platforms and print media. To find ours, I used this free website that lets you upload an image and then pull the color codes used in it. So I uploaded our image and boom! Our 3 brand colors were born.

Once that was done, I had to set out to figure out how to build a website. But that, dear cookie monster, is a blog for another day.

- DZ