Where should your marketing and promotion efforts go?

Constant Contact, by far the leading email marketing service for small businesses and nonprofits, held a webinar yesterday for Constant Contact partners — people like me who provide email marketing services to their own clients, using Constant Contact. Gail Goodman, the CEO, knows more small business people and more about how things go for them […]

About Promotion…

We have been surveying owners of local small and medium-sized businesses about how they handle advertising and promotion. It’s  a simple survey; because we wanted to get a feel for how we might help make our local area more commercially successful, and being in the graphic design business, this was an obvious subject to find […]

Making An Ad With What You Have

Working with entertainment clients, you sometimes get a project that has to be turned out very quickly with limited resources. The show WILL go on, and a full-page ad that’s due on press tomorrow must have enough impact to make people notice the show and want to attend. On this occasion, we had about three […]

A Holiday Greeting for 2011

We thought this year we’d make a video “card” for all our friends. It’s not something you can put on the mantle, and you can’t hang it off a ribbon, but you also don’t have to get rid of it after the holidays are over.

That Cheap Logo Design Website Might Not Be So Cheap

It’s a fact of the Internet that things can be copied far and wide with very little control. In some respects, that’s fantastic. You can get information about almost anything, any time. Some it is even accurate. But when it comes to betting your business on something you find “in the cloud,” it’s a good […]

So you want to learn Photoshop

I’m often asked by friends and associates to teach them this or that about Photoshop, among other graphics applications in Adobe’s massive catalog of industrial-strength software. I’ll spend half an hour or so going over how to solve the particular problem they’re wrestling with at the time. It’s fun, it breaks up my day a […]

Typing speed tip for Word and Open Office users

If you write business letters or other company documents, there are almost certainly some terms (like your company or product name), that you end up typing a lot. This might not be an issue if your company name is “Acme, Inc.,” but something like “Serious Business Strategies” or “Life Enhancement Supplement” might get a bit […]

Windows 7 Is Really That Good

I’ve been working with Windows 7 for several weeks. There’s plenty in this new version for anyone still on XP, and it’s a no-brainer for Vista users. Win 7 is nimbler than Vista, but it’s the little touches in the new user interface that I really like: things that genuinely help you get work done […]

Microsoft Office 2010 gets a movie trailer

Ever since Sprint’s success with their “movie trailer” marketing campaign for the Instinct cell phone, it seems every tech marketer has to have movies. Now it’s Microsoft, with “Office 2010 — The Movie.” It’s been up on YouTube for a couple of weeks, so if you haven’t caught it yet, here’s the link. Actually, it’s […]