BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Small business owners tend to make same mistakes, so it would be safe enough to assume that it wasn’t my other client only who thought he can get away with home-printed business cards. After all - he had a very good ink color printer and original ink, so it should be just a matter of getting a business card stock paper and aligning it in the printer properly. At least so the client thought.
Fortunately, he was stopped before ruining his reputation with such a rookie mistake. First of all - any person who held more then ten different business cards will be able to tell the difference. Home-printed cards, no matter how good the printer and the paper was, will never have a typography print feeling. Second - no matter how good you are with scissors and perforations, the edges will give you away.Of course, images we used on web site reprinted on the business cards with high-quality color print just swept prospective customers from their feet. Visiting client’s web site was a done deal.

Popularity: 20%

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We all got used to some extent to the marketers calling us at our homes, at the most inconvenient times. Now they started attacking our cell phones. Just couple of hours ago got a minute-long automated voice message advertising some sort of carpet cleaning service. A little further drilling shows that I was not alone - here http://800notes.com/Phone.aspx/1-516-962-0225 you can find quite a few annoyed people. Some of them report that “phone number traces back to “Brooks Fiber Communication” farmingdale long island”, however, I am unable to verify this.

In the early days if FIDO network, when “modems ruled the world” some pranksters got back to annoying callers by establishing crash-poll sessions in their dialer software. What such session does is repeatedly call specified number until certain packet of information successfully received. I am pretty sure such activity is illegal (and if it is not - it should be), but as far as I am concerned - some telemarketers should be excluded from the protection of law.

Of course, if anyone would be using the services of such ill-advertised company I’d say it is quite unwise.

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eMarketer provides this data as a table, so I compiled a little chart, so it is easier to get an idea. So far it looks like pretty much all the media spend is supposed to stay the same or decline insignificantly, whereas the spend on rich media/video is expected to rise significantly. This means - video (YouTube?), Flash, AIR, Flex and so on. Judging by our web design studio experience - clients who spend on rich media advertising (i.e. Flash and video) getting better returns. Obviously I am not allowed to share any numbers, but that’s the trend we see here.

BTW, that is also where we charge more money then for a plain web design - on rich media. But that comes when clients realize the potential.

Popularity: 15%

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• Small business resources - promote and advertise your business (October 2, 2007): Bank of America has this bunch of very useful online workshops on advertising and promoting your business. Click here for list (opens in a new window). Even though most of the things there are trivial, the whole thing is compiled in a very concise manner. Must have
• Sexy Girls And Hot Cars (May 20, 2008): Recently I hace stumbled on a conversation that's about as old as the marketing itself. Someone was complaining that the autoshow in their town wasn't executed properly. One of the main complaints, among others, was that sexy girls were unfriendly, didn't quite let visitors take pictures with them, some were even giving cold and [...]
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