BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

This wouldn’t be a guide to promote your small business offline, but rather a rant of small business owner who tries to do something good – and not quite succeeded.

Yesterday I spend a good hour and a half searching for small CDs at local stores – both computer oriented and those selling office supplies. While regular small CDs were sporadically available at certain merchants, the business card CDs were nowhere to be found. At a single store only I was able to find a mini-CD in quantities over 8 pieces for 8 dollars.

The story with CD labels was even worse. If you are looking for regular-sized CD labels – you are all set pretty much anywhere you go. But if you thought you could find labels for any other CD size – think again!

Overall I visited around 8 stores, 5 of them were Staples and Office Depots, three others were BestBuy, DataVision and CompUSA (that was a sorry view). While trying to order labels online at Neato I almost got hit with a charge of $50.01 for shipping on 200 pages of two sorts of labels. The amount itself was about 40% higher then the price of labels.

Looks like there is another vulnerability discovered in WordPress, that’s why I have to upload all 3.1MB of files again to all the accounts I have WP installed. After backing up the account and downloading backup.

Maybe I am being too quirky, but I would just post files that need to be updated – just like other PHP projects do – Joomla, Invision Power Board and so on.

On the other hand – maybe (just maybe) it’s time to move to SVN way of managing the multiple installations…

Thanks to Google Trends we can now know the power of Internet users’ will. Take a look at the last 30 days trends chart. While search terms “porn” and “mp3″ dominate the chart, the “super bowl” is on the rise but still way too low.

I tried to include the search term “fashion show”, since there is one under way in New York, but it just hugged the bottom and didn’t produce any significant flows on this chart.

My guess (or guesstimate) is that both “porn” and “mp3″ are too broad terms, therefore they are sought more often and produce more meaningful results. In case of “super bowl” or “fashion show” – latter being even more obvious – there’s only a handful of web sites that provide fulfilling and concise information on the subject. Actually, fashion show addicts are either glued to TVs or to the doors of many New York locations where shows are held.