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The early bird gets the worm?

Jerry — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:06:08 +0000

You have all heard that old adage that the early bird gets the worm, but is it true in business and marketing? Not really. You can be the first guy in or the last guy in, but you have to be the flexible guy who can tailor your product to each company’s needs and treat them as an individual. The best marketing and business concepts are individual treatments that help a company to stand out.

How can you stay flexible and offer a competitive product? Easy enough, especially for software, printing and related businesses. Custom templates and brochures are simple to print, but you will have to offer a way for individual designs to be incorporated into a campaign. Software is greatly customizable to individual needs.

You also have to anticipate your customers’ needs. That is where a good tracking system and print campaign work together. Think of how all of the big companies do things. Do the large retailers offer winter coats in January? No. They are already on to the upcoming needs of the customer. Their ads all offer shorts and spring jackets by January.

How does all of this tie in together? Everything that I have mentioned relates to being flexible. It is the flexible bird that gets the worm. If your customer needs a particular piece of printing or software customized to their needs, you must be willing to do it.

Do you have any other ideas or thoughts on this subject?

Three Tips for Designing Order Forms

Britt — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:30:57 +0000

Whether in a direct-mail package or online, an order form is an important part of generating leads and sales. A killer letter, brochure or e-mail message is important for getting the ball rolling, but the order form is where you actually capture the customer’s valuable information or make a sale.

If the order form doesn’t pull its own weight, the customer could lose interest, and a poorly designed order form can actually kill the sale, leaving the customer frustrated and your pockets empty.

Keep the following tips in mind to design effective, easy-to-use order forms:

1. Restate your offer
Sometimes there’s an interval between when your customer reads your e-mail or direct mail and when they actually respond. Or, in the case of direct mail, a lot of recipients will trash the whole mailing and just hang on to the reply form. That’s why its important to restate your offer on the order form. For example, if you are offering a free trial, you can keep customers interested in your offer by including a check box and some well-crafted copy such as, “Yes! I Want to Save Hours of Time and Organize my Personal Finances. Please Send Me a Risk-Free Trial of Your Get Organized Desktop Software.”

2. Don’t ask for extra information
Some businesses make the mistake of asking for too much information from a customer right off the bat. While a travel agent may benefit from finding out how many times a year Mrs. Smith vacations and where to, it’s best to save any market research questions for a later time, when you are further along the buying cycle with a customer. On an order form, stick to the information necessary to make the sale, i.e. name, mailing address and billing information and wait until you have a satisfied customer to ask for more detailed customer information.

3. Keep forms readable and writable
If you find that you are squeezing your copy and design into smaller and smaller font sizes just to get it to fit on a client’s online order page or mail form, it may be time to go back to the drawing board. For the best response, it helps to use fonts that customers can read easily, preferably without the use of their reading glasses. Also make sure you give them enough space to respond. To test your forms for ease-of-use, ask friends or coworkers to fill out the form and share their thoughts on what could be improved.

15 must-see Photoshop tutorials

Brian — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:31:10 +0000

If you love Photoshop, you’ll love it even more after learning the techniques in these tutorials:

Coloring skin and body in Photoshop and how to mimic the natural play of light upon the body.

How to create a professional Twitter background – a quick-and-easy tutorial for customizing your Twitter page.

Remember how fun watercolors used to be? You can recreate a watercolor effect with Photoshop!

Pop art a la Lichtenstein – really cool stuff for the poppy designer!

Very, very cool Photoshop tutorial on how to transform a woman’s photograph into an eerie doll face and more.

How to design a website using the 960 Grid System, an oft-employed web design technique that looks great. This tutorial includes a free 960 GS download so you can quickly deploy an original 960 design.

A tutorial that covers how to make a DVD cover with Photoshop. The techniques used here could also be applied to movie posters.

Dioramas are cool, especially when you combine several images and blur/focus PS techniques to highlight your subject.

Want to master the Photoshop warp tool? This tutorial shows you the way…

Paint splashed over the face of a photographic subject – nice. What’s really neat is that this liquid Photoshop technique can be used in many, many design applications.

Yet another awesome website design tutorial. This has a clean Web 2.0 feel that many designers like to emulate.

A very unique and creative – yet clean and easy-to-follow – website design. The techniques employed here are invaluable.

Learn how to use the Photoshop mask tool to create this model effect from a photo.

When the outer glow blending option doesn’t quite cut it – use these tips to achieve an outstanding glow emanating from your subjects.

Super cool fallen angel tutorial that shows you how to blend a woman and a bird on a textured background.

What are your favorite Photoshop techniques?

Best free Drupal themes

Brian — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:38:54 +0000

I write a lot about content management systems, probably Joomla! more than others. But by far my favorite CMS is Drupal. The system is powerful, extensible and customizable to a degree unmatched by other systems. The core delight of Drupal is that every add-on seems to work seamlessly with all other add-ons, while other systems have add-ons that conflict with one another and cause hellish nightmares of PHP code and .htaccess horrors.

One of the things I love about Drupal is the free themes — many of them look great and they’re easy to change (Joomla! is the same way, really). Here are three of my favorites, and why:

I love Acquia Marina because it’s easy to work with and customize, if you even want to. The entire template is elegant and Web 2.0, including form fields, which typically look blocky with most other themes. A bit of CSS can clear that up, sure, but it’s nice to not have to code any more than I have to (since I’m NOT a developer by trade, my knowledge is limited). Acquia Marina also features 15-plus block regions, allowing you to shape your site’s features however you’d like.

Contrast is another favorite of mine, mostly because it’s incredibly simple to work with. Contrast doesn’t offer a lot of options, but the layout is clean and the navigation is intuitive. Like Acquia Marina, Contrast is easy to customize and serves as a great base for the Ubercart shopping cart, though this isn’t its intended purpose.

For the hardcore custom Drupal nuts, I favor the Zen theme because it’s meant to be a developer’s template you can build on to create your own custom theme. I’ve used it on several projects and it has performed well to date. For Drupal customization, Zen is the platform to build with.

What are your favorite free Drupal themes?

The power of the super-niche

Brian — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:15:11 +0000

To small businesses, finding the perfect niche can be likened to finding the Fountain of Youth — it will sustain you forever.

Identifying the perfect niche can indeed be like finding a needle in a haystack, but it’s well worth the effort. Ultra-defined niches in the right market serve as a fast track to the top and attract customers with cash in hand. Your marketing dollars aren’t wasted, and your return on investment is high. Behold the power of the super-niche.

The Joomla! open source content management system is a rising star and serves a market ripe with potential super-niches. Take the aspiring web developer as an example: Our web developer knows that to increase his value he needs to find his niche or be a journeyman, a jack of all trades and master of none. So, he chooses to be a Joomla! developer. He’s found his niche.

But his niche isn’t good enough. There are tons of Joomla! developers, and so the competition is fierce, and fees are diluted. If our web developer truly wants to make his mark, he needs to specialize in a sub-niche. He knows that every Joomla! website needs a Joomla! template, so he decides to specialize in coding Joomla! templates. His super-niche. If he markets his services to the right people, he will be a success and, if his work is good, he will become the authority on Joomla! template development. And he will be wealthy.

Every industry can be similarly broken down to reveal niches, sub-niches and finally super-niches. Do your homework and identify three potential super-niches in your market. What are they? Can you harness their power?

Tips for choosing a quality brochure template

Jerry — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:33:43 +0000

Brochures come in many forms — postcards, tri-fold brochures, flyers, etc. — but there are a few tips that need to be followed when you are looking for a template to guide you through the creation process.

A brochure can be a double-edged sword. If it is created effectively it will promote your company, help with marketing and sales and assist in the branding of your company’s name. If it is poorly constructed it will be considered trash and tarnish your company’s reputation.

If you decide to purchase a brochure template online, do not buy the first flashy one you see. Go through every single template that you can. Look for three things: originality, quality and cost effectiveness. Once you have found a brochure template that meets those qualifications, you will need to follow these tips to make sure you have a successful brochure campaign:

Overall design and graphics

Symmetrical design is considered the best, but other design formations can be used if you are careful. The quality of graphics says a lot about your company. Use images that are at least 300 dpi. Also, use images that are pleasing to the eye and not a stark contrast to the rest of the brochure. Use curved or complex shapes to show an overall mastery of the design technique.

Color scheme

Colors talk to potential customers. They set moods. They tell a story about your company’s ability to design a print campaign. Use pleasing and happy colors that will influence your clients’ moods.

Format

You only want to by a brochure template once, so make sure it comes in different formats; otherwise you will have to buy a software package to be able to edit and customize it for different campaigns.

Look for .psd, .cdr, .pmd, .ai, .pdf, and .eps.

Customer service

There’s a difference between customer service and quality customer service. We all know the difference between the two. Look for reviews of the company. Since there can be editing and downloading issues, make sure there is quality customer service available to you during your business hours.

Most template providers do not print your materials as well. You are better off looking for a company that offers both. Make sure that the printing company is highly reputable and your print campaigns will be successful every time.

Can you think of any other tips to follow when you are looking for or using a brochure template?