No.. A Nice Logo will Not make your site Profitable

Some domainers seem to think that a logo can make or break a good site. I have news for you – it can not, unless this is a site selling logos, and even then it’s not that important.

Recently I was building some new sites and needed to get about 20 different logos done. I checked about 30 designers, looking quickly over their portfolios to see their quality. It may sound like a lot, but in fact it only takes me a few seconds to take a quick look at the designer’s portfolio to know if this is what I need or not. And after that initial glance a couple minutes maximum and I have a pretty good idea of what this designer can do.

So I received price suggestions and solicitations with portfolios and examples from these designers and picked one that was a bit more expensive than average, but the quality of his designs was truly great. All that took about an hour and around $150 (for the 20 logos). Some might consider it expensive, others would say it’s cheap, but this is the price you can get good quality logos for at various forums and freelancer sites. And I do mean good quality, highly professional which are not worse than those you can get by running a contest at 99designs.com – because in fact on 99designs.com these are the same people making your logos.

It’s true there are many people willing to pay $50 and $100 and even more for a logo, others arrange contests and ask for forum members to vote for their best choice. And I could understand when it’s a logo for a big business, a chain of sites, a company site, or  something like Bido.com (R.I.P.), but when you’re just building some mini site on a .info domain – who cares what logo you have?

What really makes a site profitable (assuming you are not just building the sites to be able to say that you’re developing your domains..) is a strategy for acquiring traffic (SEO for example, then you need decent content and lots of links) and monetization (adsense, affiliate sales, leads).  So stop fixating on your logos and go get some backlinks instead!