BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Small businesses, especially those that are not geographically “challenged”, should not limit themselves to small-scale marketing tools. Coupons, flyers, business cards, comp cards - it all can work for geographical regions of a small scale. Sending out postcards or distribute flyers can get really expensive as your targeted location grows in size. These marketing tools can’t distinguish among prospective clients, regular clients or, so-called, premium clients. Yes, big news, you have to keep promoting yourself to your premium clients too. It’s like dating - guy is supposed to bring flowers to his girlfriend or wife even after they moved in or got married.

Really neat idea was suggested by some of our customers. They give out free magazine subscriptions to their premium clients. Obviously, it’s not just any magazine - it’s the magazine about the industry they engaged it, and the magazine where their advertising shows up quite often. It may sound like a cheap trick. In fact - it’s just indirect marketing to your existing clients. Just a little something to keep them happy.

Popularity: 13%

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• Offline-Online Promotion For Small Businesses - Part 2 (January 15, 2008): 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 [...]
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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.

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Whenever new task is taken to online I almost always get happier. Google Docs, Zoho, Microsoft Office Live - all good and all merry. They all have only one drawback - they don’t work if you are not connected. However, with mobile networks getting more widespread and higher speeds the problem with not being connected slowly vanishing. After office application, CRMs and online banking comes image editing and property management. Next summer you may see the return of online grocery shopping (isn’t there already something like this?).We have almost covered all our needs with online services. You don’t even have to open the door anymore to get something. Watch movies online. Read books online. Talk to people and play games. Work, get your money, pay bills - everything could be done from the comfort of your chair. We’re becoming a civilization of most connected lonely people ever.

Popularity: 25%

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• Someone up there loves me (August 1, 2007): Yes, someone up there must love me, here's the HTC Advantage that is large enough to read/view/game away plus it acts as a GSM cell phone. Just the answer to my yesterday's rant. Well, at least to the first part. The only two noticed problems are the weight/size (damn, with 5 inches of screen real estate [...]
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