Will the real culprit behind time management issues please stand up?

This is a guest post by Mona Andrei. Mona is a seasoned writer with a background in marketing. Driven by a hamster that never stops turning (ever), she’s also the blogger behind Moxie-Dude.com and author of “The Single Mom’s Manifesto – Remember your dreams”, a short ebook that demonstrates how even a single mom can create a life by design. Download your free copy here.

 

Have you ever looked at a successful person – someone who just seems to be able to get so much done in a day – and wonder how they do it?

I have a friend (we’ll call her Jennifer) and I’m always amazed at her list of accomplishments. Even now, as we approach the busy holiday season, she’s got everything under control. Her house is ready for the annual family gathering, she has a freezer full of prepared meals and baked goods, and she’s already finished her holiday shopping. On top of this, she runs her own boutique advertising agency.

“The more I do, the more I seem to get done,” she answered recently when I asked her how she’s able to handle everything so well.

She’s an inspiration and I’m in awe of her ability to manage every aspect of her life. I also hate her.

“Why can’t I be more like her?” Is a question I ask myself often, especially when I look at my own list of pending tasks.

Career, house, kids, deadlines – Jennifer and I practically have parallel lives and yet she’s on top of hers while I struggle with my dungenous to-do list. (“Dungenous” is not an actual word but clearly it should be.)

What is Wordpress and is it for me?

Last weekend a good friend asked me if I could help him understand Wordpress a little bit. He's looking at creating a new site but is not sure that he'll have the technical knowledge necessary to install Wordpress or customize it and he's a little bit confused as to what is involved in the creation of the site. The conversation was fun and it inspired me to write about it here, so I prepared a little video to answer his questions.

Getting introduced to Wordpress

I created my very first website back in 2007, for my wedding. At the time I knew of blogging and had tried Blogger, bit didn't know much about Wordpress and didn't realize that it could be used to create something more than a blog. So I looked for help online and created my website with Frontpage. It was a very basic website as you can imagine, but it was a great way to learn the basics about creating a website: hosting, domain, Html coding, etc..

Five years later, I have much more experience with website design, having worked with agencies to create a few websites, whether based on Content Management Systems or coded from scratch, and I have really come to love Wordpress for its simplicity and flexibility.

In fact when I see so many businesses paying a fortune to create their websites, I wish they knew about Wordpress and weren't so scared to give it a try.

What is Wordpress?

Wordpress is a great blogging engine that can be used to create many types of websites, including eCommerce sites. It's an open source product, i.e. free to install so the costs of running a Wordpress website are very low. In the following video, I discuss the differences between creating a free website on Wordpress.com and creating a self hosted website from Wordpress.org.

[video type="youtube" clip_id="YftHzG13qgE" autohide="0"]

Is Wordpress for me?

If you want to start blogging, definitely.

If you want to start a corporate website, don't want to spend 50k on it but still want a professional result with maximized flexibility, it's perfect.

It's probably not for you if you're in a very large corporation and IT specialists want you to use their preferred provider, or if you're running a very large shopping website. But in most cases, for small businesses, entrepreneurs and bloggers, Wordpress is the way to go.

Question: Do you have a website? Which platform did you use to design it, and are you happy with it?

Understanding layers in Photoshop

As I mentioned before, I am a big fan of Photoshop and all the other Adobe products. I really want people to understand what they can do with Photoshop and so I would like to create a few tutorials to teach the basics of how to use the tool. At this point I am not sure exactly what kind of tutorials I would create, but I can imagine that they would be for beginners, obviously not for graphic designers, and would target very specific uses, like for example how to cut the background around a product photo; things really practical for entrepreneurs who need to learn the basics.

With that in mind I went to see my husband, who is an entrepreneur and asked me a few times to help him with Photoshop, and asked him: "what should I teach first?". And he replied:"layers, because most people don't understand how they work, and it's not really a concept used in Microsoft products."

So here you are, this short video explains the concept of layers in Photoshop:
[video type="youtube" clip_id="loe7wKzsK10" autohide="0"]

PS: Sorry for the bad quality, I'm still experimenting with my setup..

Discovering Toastmasters

A couple of weeks ago I went to my first Toastsmasters meeting. For those of you who don't know Toastmasters, it's a American Association designed to help people  improve their public speaking skills. I'd been considering going for a while but only decided to give it a try when my good friend Matt asked me if I would be keen to go along with him. I really enjoyed the experience so I thought I would put a note on  my blog, for people who don't know about Toastmasters.



The club we went to in Lausanne, Switzerland is gathering twice a month at a local restaurant and follows a strict schedule that is common to all the Toastmasters clubs.  There is the president of the club who first introduces the meeting, the guests, etc.. There is also the Toastmaster, who is kind of the master of ceremony. He's there doing transitions between each presentation, each exercise that takes place and it's a really nice role to have. There are a few other roles, like the time keeper, the reviewers, the Ah counter (more on this leater), etc.. And there are guests, people like Matt and me, who want to see for themselves what it's all about before deciding to become a member. We were 11 guests that night and that was quite amazing, we got a lot of energy from this group.

And so we started with the first presentation which was given by a lady doing her very first speech. She was telling a story about her childhood in Malaysia and that was a very nicely  put together story. I have to say, for her first speech it was quite impressive. She was using very nice vocabulary, a good speech structure, nice gestures and even a little bit of humor. She was doing quite well, and the speech lasted I think 7 minutes, which is quite a long time actually when you're alone in front of a crowd (even if it's just 20 people), talking when everyone is looking at you or even evaluating your performance.

My first video for the blog

A couple of months ago I entered a challenge on the Smart Passive income blog: to create a Youtube video. I had two months to complete the challenge, until October 31st, and it seemed like a really easy challenge to enter. Entering the challenge would send me a few benefits:

• Being listed on the SPI blog, which gets tens of thousands of visitors a months, would help me get traffic to my site and maybe new regular readers


• I would actually get started at creating videos, something that I have been contemplating for ages but never really started.

Well, as easy as it sounded, I waited until last Thursday to create my video. I was so scared to jump in front of the camera, to put my voice on the screen, and to run dry of ideas, that I never started and kept finding excuses.

But I finally decided to create my video last week and I'm glad I did: it was a lot of fun!

I kept it very simple for my first try and basically did a video version of a blog post I already published: An introduction to design tools for marketers: differences between photoshop, illustrator and indesign.

So here is the video:

[video type="youtube" clip_id="Uk52AFwbJG0" autohide="0"]

Feel free to leave comments!

5 ways to teach yourself anything

I used to love school. Really. I loved school because I liked being around my friends, because every day was different, but also because I liked learning things. I've always been interested in learning new things.

I studied mechanical engineering because I was good at all scientific subjects and I liked to understand how things worked (although my husband often wonders how I got my degree :) ). But then I did an extra year to study marketing. It was a completely different field, but I loved it and this dual competence really served me in my career so far.



Soon after, I began working as a marketing assistant, and it might well be then that I started learning the most. I had to learn about the corporate world, about conducting meetings, running projects, organizing trade shows, preparing press releases, replying to RFQs, all the things that the job would throw at me. One aspect that particularly interested me was the design part of marketing materials. We relied on agencies to create our brochures, but I wanted to learn how to do it myself. So I did just that and today I'm able to design a brochure, retouch a photo, code some HTML and even more.

In fact, if I think about it, I taught myself many things: drawing portraits, drawing cartoons, using photoshop with advanced techniques, sewing, crocheting, cooking, Email marketing, all sorts of things, without spending a fortune.

Lessons I learned during a business workshop

Last week I participated in a full day workshop organised at work by our management team. The whole company is going through this process, with every employee participating in one of the four workshops planned over the next few weeks. The workshops are designed partly to improve cooperation between employees but also to work together on a chosen business case.



We had an external coach come in and facilitate the day, which took place off site in a hotel conference room. The coach had everything organised before we arrived and set us to work in three teams, each consisting of people of different age, department or career advancement.

The day basically consisted of a series of team exercises that would help us formulate a proposal to be presented in front of the management team later on. The exercises were all creative, using various techniques (brainstorming, frenzies, 6 thinking hats methods), all helping us put a proposal to shape with the help of flipcharts, post-its and markers. Being quite creative myself I have to say it was quite a bit of fun.

Lessons we learned  during the workshop

At the end of the day, we had 3 proposals to present to the managers, so that was the first concrete outcome of the workshop, one to the benefit of the company.

But we also spent some time discussing how we felt after such a focused day, and we could all agree that such a workshop was great for anyone to work on the following skills:

• Cooperation
  Every one had a role to play, whether facilitating an exercise, keeping track of time, writing on the flipchart or presenting something.

• Communication
  Since we all had to present in front of an audience at some point, that was a good exercise. People had to remember to speak clearly and loud and organize their ideas.

• Planning and Organisation
  We had to make the most of the short allotted time slots we had for each exercise, and learned a few things along the way: manage time effectively (use time blocks, start and finish on time), define clear roles in the team and be specific in your project proposal: specify deliverables, resources, time constraints, budget, etc.

•  Creativity
  Workshops can be a lot of fun with all the tools available, but we can sometimes run dry of new ideas. Using various techniques to boost creativity is a great way of ensuring fresh ideas coming up all the time. Techniques we used included for example: brainstorming, the 6 thinking hats, frenzies, asking questions on different perspectives.

But what I found particularly amazing was that we ended up with three excellent but very different proposals. Although we all had the same instructions, tools and exercises, our proposals differed not only by their content or the way they were presented, but also by the way they were put together: one was very structured, with clear drivers, action plans and KPIs; another one was very specific, focusing on a particular action to implement while the last one was far more generic and focused on creating a mindset more than actions.

Overall I enjoyed the experience and I am glad that my company organised the worshop. What about you, have you already organised workshops for your staff?

photo credit: pinkpurse via photopin cc

Vector files at your fingertips with Powerpoint

I seem to be writing a few posts about Powerpoint these days, and I think it's mainly because I had a very limited choice of software to work with at the office for a while, so I was force to work with what I had. To my surprise, recent versions of Powerpoint are quite powerful and offer a lot of nice features for arranging or transforming graphics.

One of the great features that I have discovered lately is the ability to modify vector files directly in Powerpoint. For those of you not knowing what a vector file is, please read this post where I explain the difference between a vector file and a rastor file, or photo. The important point to know about a vector file is that it can be scaled without losing resolution, and it can be easily modified in terms of shape or color, as long as you have the right software to do so. Well that's what I thought until I learned about Powerpoint's ability to do so.

But before I show you how it works I just want to state why I think this is a really cool feature.

The reason why I love vector files is that they are drawn. You can customize them to be the right color, to match your style, to look like an icon, etc.. Options are infinite. And they are a much better looking option than cliparts when you need to illustrate a presentation or any other document. Finally, they are available in many places on the web, either for free on websites like Vecteezy or for a small price on Istockphoto.

Quick tip: how to add effects to your photos with Powerpoint

In this post I will share a quick tip that I learned not long ago for adding effects to your photos by using only Powerpoint. I find this technique very practical since it doesn't require any other software than powerpoint, meaning that I can edit photos on almost any machines I work with.



The types of effects that you can apply to your images are basically all the "styles" that Powerpoint offers, like changing colors, adding a border, adding some shadow, adding some 3D effect, etc.. They are very easy to apply and can be customized reasonably well. So let's take an example and see how it works.

Imagine that you have a nice landscape picture to display on your site, on which you want to add a nice border and drop shadow effect. You could choose to work with Photoshop, but it would require quite a few steps and manipulations, let alone the skills to do it. Instead, you can quickly choose a style in Powerpoint like for example here "Metal Frame" and customize your photo instantly.



Once the effect is applied, all you need to do is to right-click and select "save as picture". You can save your photo as a .png file and it will keep the border, the shadow and even the transparency around the shadow.



Your photo is now ready to be used on your website.


photo credit: Werner Kunz via photo pin cc

How to design promotional calendars

Last week I wrote about promotional calendars and shared my view on why I think they are useful and should always be considered as part of one's promotional toolkit. This week I will share some ideas on what type of calendars you can create, and other practical tips to consider before making a final decision.


photo credit: skyseeker via photo pin cc

Choosing the right format.

There are many types of calendars that you can create depending on the shape you choose or the way the dates are displayed. You can create a wall calendar, a desk calendar, a yearly planner, a pocket size calendar or a more creative calendar like monthly cards displayed in a CD box. Here is a quick review of the types of calendars I have experimented with:

The life cycle of the coffee cup [infographics]

This post is a little bit off topic but it's about something I had fun designing and a story we can probably all relate to. We have a couple of coffee machines at work and used to have disposable cups that people would throw away after drinking their coffee. A little while ago, we became a little bit more eco-friendly and replaced the disposable cups with real cups that we could reuse. We even have a dishwasher so that people don't need to wash their cups if they don't want to.

But what we find is that people are just lazy, messy and disrespectful of their colleagues and their worplace: we continuously find dirty cups in the sink, clean dishwashers that nobody wants to empty or dirty dishwashers that nobody takes time to start. We tried displaying a couple of signs in the kitchen, sending a message in the staff newsletter, to no avail, no change happened. We then started brainstorming on how to make it change and thought that a bit of humor might work, so we came up with the idea of designing a flowchart showing people what to do after they drank their coffee.

Here is the flowchart, illustrated in the shape of an infographic: The Life Cycle of the Coffee Cup.

If this story is familiar to you (it might even be the same in your own house), feel free to use it, or share it!

5 reasons why you should send a promotional calendar to your clients

It is probably that time of the year when you are planning for your Christmas cards and corporate gifts. Actually, if you are not planning them yet, get moving because these things take time to get prepared and comes first of January it's too late to send them! One option you need to consider is to create a customized calendar as a gift.



photo credit: Seattle Roll via photo pin cc

Here are my five reasons why I think you should send a promotional calendar to your clients.

How to choose the right color palette for your presentations

If you're struggling with choosing colors for your presentations, don't be scared, you're not the only one.

In the old days of using projectors, we didn't really have this problem, but with powerpoint, keynotes or other presentation software available today, there are just unlimited possibilities when it comes to choosing a design and a color scheme. First you have a large palette of colors available, then you also have the option of adding effects like gradients, transparency, etc..

So how do you choose which colors to use in your presentations?

Simple, follow these tips.

1. Less is more

When it comes to design, but even more to colors, remember this: less is more.

Restrain yourself from adding too many colors for the sake of making your design look more sophisticated or pleasant on the eye; you will only achieve the opposite. Too many colors bring clutter!

I would stick to 4 or 5 colors at most: 2 for the text and 2 or 3 for illustrations.

Most people use variations in the color of their text for highlighting certain sections, but it really makes their slides messy. Instead, use bold text if you want to highlight something, but don't change to red or green. Just choose one color for titles and one color for the body.



Same with your illustrations when you add shapes, lines and arrows in your slides, do not overdo it. Keep it simple, limit yourself to 2 or 3 colors.

2. Make sure to be in line with your branding

If you already have a brand with a logo or maybe even a website, then there is no need to reinvent the wheel. The key to good branding is to be consistent with your design, and the easiest way to stay consistent across your marketing material is by using the same color palette everywhere.

So look at your logo, your website, your brochures. Which colors do you have at your disposal? Remember, less is more so keep it simple.

3. Choose the mood you want to give to your presentation

Do you want your presentation to look modern, retro, fun, conservative, corporate, artistic? The combination of colors you select can easily give a specific mood to your presentation. Have a look at the examples below and see for yourself.

4. Select or create your color palette with ColourLovers

COLOURlovers is one of many websites that will help you come up with a pretty color palette. You can browse existing palettes or design your own.

A very easy way to create your own palette and make sure it is harmonious is to create a palette from a photo. This way you can match your color palette to your logo for example.

To illustrate my point, see what color palettes people are extracting from beautiful photos on Pinterest:

Photo credit Shelly Fuehrer

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Photo credit Donna W

5. Customize your powerpoint theme colors

Once you have chosen your colors, customise the theme colors of your presentation template, so that you will easily access them from the color menu of Powerpoint.

To change the theme, under the Design tab, click Colors then click Create new theme colors. Modify the various colors - you can see a live sample of your chosen color combination - then add a new name for this new color palette and save.

I hope this is helpful. There are many more things to discuss about colors and many tools to review, but that will be for another time.

ONE Simple Way To Find the Best SEO Agency

This is a guest post from Tapha. Tapha is the founder of MyAppTemplates.com, a site that provides custom iphone app templates to people who cannot afford to spend $1,000′s on their iphone app design.

 

There's a great article by Bob Hoffman, a veteran ad man and blogger, that highlights what it is that separates the best ad people from everybody else. It's very good. I recommend that you check it out here.

What it says, quite simply, is that the best people, the ones at the top their game, are the ones that seem to NOTICE things better than everybody else.

Here is a passage from the post:

"Then the other night, slithering on hands and knees from the bed to the bathroom, it struck me. There's a much simpler and more satisfying explanation. The attribute that makes people exceptional at advertising is that they're better at noticing things. They're good noticers.

They notice what people really do. They notice what people have in their refrigerators. They notice the little lies that people tell themselves and each other. They notice the contradictions between attitudes and behaviors. They notice the small, seemingly irrelevant things that most people don't notice."

It's a very interesting observation and one that I happen to agree with. The best people, by and large, are the ones that see what other people don't.

This is no more true than for people in SEO. Infact, I'd argue that this trait is even more important to have as an SEO than it is in any other area of online marketing. The SEO space is full of so many moving parts that change constantly, that an enhanced ability to notice things that others may miss is not only an advantage, it's a downright neccessity.


photo credit: Darwin Bell via photo pin cc

So how does this help you to spot the best SEO agency to work with?

The answer is that THEY (the best ones) will have this quality, I'll call it 'good taste'. And it can be spotted.

How to keep your business blog interesting for your readers

Last week I got an email from a friend and she asked me this: "Christelle – we are writing a blog on our company's website and I wondered if you had any tips on how to keep it interesting?"

I was really proud that she was asking me for advice about blogging and felt really compelled and excited to answer her email. So as soon as I got a bit of time, I opened my gmail and started writing a few tips. The email ended up longer than I thought and as I was writing it, I thought to myself: well, actually this would be a perfect story for my blog, my readers can benefit from these tips too. So here we go.

How to keep your blog interesting?

For your business blog, the first thing to do is to think your about blog's objectives. Why are you launching a blog, what are you trying to achieve with it? It will help you make sure that you are writing for the right reasons. I wrote an article on how to define objectives for your website, you can apply the same principles for your blog. 



photo credit: Genista via photo pin cc

Then you need to meet with your colleagues, and list all the types of posts that you can write:

• Case studies


• News


• Upcoming events


• Behind the scene


• People stories


• Tutorials


• Etc..

What Steve Jobs can teach us about fonts

If you never heard the speech that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford University back in 2005, I recommend that you head over to Youtube now and listen to it, it is highly inspiring. There is one particular element of the speech that I want to refer to, which is the story Steve tells about calligraphy. Having dropped off college, he attended a few creative classes and got really interested in the beauty of calligraphy. What didn't seem as an important skill to gain at the time, resulted in a revolutionary way to approach text on computers. He said later: "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

[video type="youtube" clip_id="UF8uR6Z6KLc" autohide="0" autoplay="false" controls="true"]

What lessons should you learn from Steve?

Today there are thousands of fonts of all types available and it would be foolish not to pay attention to them. Fonts can instantly change the look and feel of any piece of communication, be it printed or digital. They can instantly transmit a feeling of elegance, grunge, modern, retro, futuristic, comic, you name it... Fonts are just as important as color, composition or photography and should not be left ignored. Too many small businesses keep working with the Arial, Times New Roman or Calibri fonts installed by default, without realizing the opportunity they miss to instantly make their material looking professional with the use of better fonts.

Don't make these 5 mistakes when choosing your design software

"Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself. " Groucho Marx. << Tweet this

As you probably guessed from reading this post I love Adobe software and I love Photoshop in particular. For the last 5 months, I've been trying to get Photoshop installed on my work machine, but being part of a large corporation I encountered some serious resistance. I won't go in the details of the story, but basically I've been denied Photoshop because of its price and was told to use Paint Shop Pro, a much cheaper alternative with the same functionality - or so they said.

The result is me being frustrated every single time I design something, wasting hours to find workarounds and slowly losing my skills at Photoshop.


photo credit: kevin dooley via photo pin cc

So here are some lessons for you to take, don't do these 5 mistakes:

1. Looking only at the price

Sure, good software is expensive, but there might a good reason for this and it's always good to remember that there are hidden costs associated with using your software. If the tool is not well designed or you work slowly with it, then it is extra time that you spend on it, and we all know that time is valuable.

The Handy guide to choosing your web design agency

Let's say you are on a mission to start a new website for your business, you set the objectives and analysed your audience, but how do you select the right agency to design it? Here are some ideas to consider:

Local Vs Remote agency

The first question you want to ask yourself is: where do you want your agency to be? In most cases it will be close to your office so that you can have face to face meetings reasonably often, save on travel costs and have some kind of flexibility. I used to work with an agency just one block away and it was really handy when we needed to drop some products for a photo shoot or go there to clarify some points on ongoing projects.

A completely different option might be to choose an agency anywhere in the world and work with them virtually on the phone, skype, email, etc.. This is a very realistic approach and is made very easy with today's technologies. You might want to choose this option if you live in a very small town with little resources around, if you're very picky and want to choose the best designers on the planet, or if you want to work on a very low cost budget from an Asian agency. I worked with an agency in China on the development of a new website and we were so happy with the result that we asked them to design our product catalogue. We communicated mainly by email and skype chat with the odd phone call, and with a little bit of organisation it ended up working quite well.

Web design agency Vs Marcomms agency

There are plenty of agencies out there and it might be quite confusing at times to know which do what exactly. Some agencies focus only on website design while others offer a broad range of services by leveraging partners' expertise. Depending on your experience with agencies and the level of existing material you already have for your business, you might have different needs.

For example, if you are starting a new business, it might pay to go to a more general agency that will be able to offer advice on branding, messages and other communications activities to tie with your website. If on the contrary you already have a corporate identity well defined, have a set of brochures, and just need a website with reasonably complex functions, you might prefer working with a specialised web agency. They will have more coders and designers in-house and more relevant experience.

How a good audience analysis will improve your website

During the planning phase of your new website, after you've done some ground work on setting clear objectives and defining the mission of your site, it is equally important that you spend some time looking at your audience and study how it will impact your site.

In the last few months, I have been involved in a few projects related to new websites or website redesigns, and I found that working with my colleagues on this particular exercise was very helpful to understand what the website was supposed to achieve and to ensure we didn't forget anyone in the equation.



Here is a table that I have been using explaining what I mean. The idea is to segment the target audience and analyze each segment separately by asking a few questions. Of course there might be some common answers across the various segments, which is fine.

• Audience segment:
  It might be that you are only addressing one audience, but in most cases, you will have two or three, or maybe more.


• Description:
  Here you should try to describe each segment as much as you can, using a full sentence, but also using characteristics like gender, age group, nationality, etc..


• Current Situation:
  This will help determine the current relationship you have with each segment and see where there is room for improvement.


• Communications objectives:
  What are you trying to do with your website? Educate people, convince them to buy a product, make connections? Try and use active verbs (educate, inform, convince, etc..)


• What they want to learn on your website:
  This will help you define the content of your site.


• What they want to do on your website:
  This will help you define the functions of your site.


• Key messages:
  What is your positioning and unique selling proposition for each segment? Write some simple messages, you can always refine them later.

7 reasons to start a blog to promote your business

In today's world, most businesses have a website promoting their products and services. They'll have a page presenting their business and then go into the details of what products they sell, or what services they offer. However, there is often a limit to how much information they can publish on the website, simply because of the structure of the site.

Here come blogs!



Photo credit: Kevin Dooley

Business blogs bring numerous advantages, and help you on your journey to promote your business better and get more customers. Plus, with all the blogging platforms available today, it couldn't be easier to start a blog. So let's get right into it, and see what a blog can do for you:

1. A blog helps establishing your brand and show that you are an expert in your field.

Publishing regular content about your industry, offering advice, tips or product reviews will convince people that you have expertise in your field.

2. A blog drives more traffic to your website.

Every blog post is a new opportunity to link to your website. Blogging regularly and creating relevant content will also help with your google search ranking and bring you more visitors.

3. A blog helps you improve your relationship with your customers.

Where else can you talk to your customers, show them your view on your industry, give them advice or even ask them questions? Embracing comments is a wonderful way to get feedback from your customers and know what they actually want or need from you.

4. A blog helps you promote your services.

If you are in the service industry, you can easily use your blog to showcase the latest work you've done for a client. A landscape designer could for example write a "before/after" post and impress their readers with the end result. Showcases or case studies are some of the best ways to convince your clients that they need your services, by simply showing them how they could benefit from working with you.

5. A blog helps you sell your products.

Why not write your own product review? Explain what makes your product better than the competition's, list all its benefits, tell people how to use it, show tips and tricks, or unusual ways people have used this product for. As an example, have a look at the Evernote Blog. Evernote is an online note taking application, and they make a brilliant use of their blog, showing amongst other things how some people use Evernote in a creative way to simplify their life.

6. A blog keeps people coming back to your site.

As long as you publish content that is relevant to your business, offer value to your readers, people will come back to your blog! If you publish regularly, your readers will know they can expect some new information on your site and will come back for it.

7. It's free!

Do you know the advertising rate in your local newspaper, or how much a radio advert would cost you? Well let me tell you we're talking big numbers. Blogging, on the other end, can be done at no cost if you choose so! Plus your content will stay on the web for as long as you want it to. It's not a single publication, or a week-long campaign, you can in fact benefit from it day after day, after day.

By now you should get a better understanding of how a blog can help you promote your business, in a cost effective way. And that's what it's all about, here at the Handy Marketer. I help you promote your business with better design and clever marketing.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about blogging for business, what worked for you or what other benefits you noticed, so feel free to comment.

Website planning: setting clear objectives

So you have a small business and you're looking at creating a new website, or redesigning your existing site. But where do you start?

10 years ago this question would have been simple to answer. Creating a website was very difficult if you weren't a designer with extensive knowledge in programming and coding, so you would simply have gone to a local web design agency, and get a quote. Today, technology has advanced tremendously and there are many platforms available for creating websites without knowing anything about coding, which opens new opportunities for small businesses to design their own websites.

Whether you choose to work with an agency or build your own website, I think the most important step towards creating your website is to plan it carefully. You need to think long and hard about this website, why you need it, how much time and money you are going to invest in it, what it is going to achieve for you, who it is going to be addressed to, etc.. All these questions should be properly answered before you even start wondering what the site will look like or who will design it.
Website Objectives.



Photo credit: PhillipC

This is the first post of a series that will teach you how to start a new website. In this series, I will give you tools and recommendations for each step of the project, from the initial planning to the design part if you wish to go down this route. I will also talk about working with agencies, outsourcing work, managing the content and the maintenance of the website. In the last 8 years I have worked on many websites, small and large, managed either by agencies or in-house, B2C or B2B, so I have been exposed to all the stages of a website life cycle and can draw from my experience to share what I've learned.

So let's go back to planning, and first things first: create a business case for your website.

Make your brand sticky with a custom cartoon character

Have you ever wondered how to make your brand sticky?

Whether you want to market your business or your personal brand, it is important to give your audience easy ways to remember your brand. You might want to use a clever name, a strong slogan or even a singing jingle for radio adverts.

 

 

But I would like to suggest something different: cartoon characters, or mascots as some people call them.

Mascots are brilliant in many ways.For a start they are usually colorful and attractive, so they improve the design of your marketing material, whether you use them on your website, brochure, or business card. Then they add a personal touch that helps people connect with your brand. They also add a touch of humor, and I like to think that it's OK to use humor in your business life, as long as it remains professional and non-degrading. Finally, when designed carefully, mascots also help people understand what your brand is about.

Take the example of the Handy Marketer mascot. To me, this site is about providing practical tips about marketing and design, things that I learned on the field, by myself most times. I originally wanted to call it the DIY Marketer, but the URL was taken, so I stayed with The Handy Marketer instead. When I was thinking about my logo, I instantly thought about this little DIY girl. The character is a curly girl wearing drawing tools on her belt, because I really wanted to emphasize the DIY aspect. I guess I could have used a business shirt or something more professional to relate to Marketing, but I wanted to keep it relatively low key.

So how do you design your own mascot?

Let me share some tips with you:

How to use the iPad to showcase your work portfolio

One of the most powerful sales tool for any business is a good portfolio of work. Regardless of your industry and the nature of the products or services that you offer, case studies and showcases are a very good way to show your prospects what you are capable of doing, and who you already did it for. It makes your business seem more real and it can make you look very professional if done well. For example, most photographers use their portfolio to display the best photos they took for their clients. It's natural and crucial for them to have a portfolio given the visual nature of the job. But many other types of business can benefit from a portfolio: a house renovator could show before/after transformations, a chef could show menus he created, etc..

A portfolio of work can also be used at a more personal level, to showcase your own abilities. For example, I created a portfolio of my professional achievements and used it at numerous occasions when trying to land a new job. Initially I created a pdf portfolio and would send it by email or post it online, but later on I discovered the powerful magic of the iPad. I would take the iPad to a job interview and towards the end of the meeting would ask the recruiter if they would be interested in seeing my portfolio, to illustrate all the things we discussed during the interview. Needless to say, I had great results with this. For a start there is the effect of surprise, employers don't always expect to be presented with a portfolio (at least for a marketing job - it might be different if you apply for a graphic artist position), but mainly it's the iPad that adds the interest. It gives you this geeky edge, you become original and the best part is that your portfolio actually looks amazing on the ipad, way more attractive than printed and placed in a ring binder.

 

So let's look at how you can create your own portfolio, and how to transfer it to the iPad.

Stop reading your emails and become more productive

I know I'm going to touch a popular and well debated subject, but today I want to talk about managing emails and improving productivity. In the last few months I often stumbled on blog posts about productivity, telling me to stop reading my emails if I wanted to get things done. In theory it seems sensible, but in real life, we all have team projects going on, deadlines to deal with, fires to attend to and so it seems unreasonable to shut down Outlook and expect to make progress without creating more backlog. Plus let's admit it, we're addicted to them, emails make us feel connected.



Photo from Nicolas_T

Well, that's what I thought, until I actually tried it for myself. A few months ago, I decided to give it a go and see how it would help me. So now I have removed all outlook notifications -sound and bouncing icon- and I have also set my iphone so that it doesn't bing when I get a new email. I keep outlook open so that I still get meeting reminders but I actually don't look at it until I have finished any task I am working on.

In parallel, I use time blocks to make sure I work on one project at a time, and dedicate enough time to it. I usually plan my blocks at the beginning of the week or first thing in the morning, so that even if I need to attend some meetings, I know I still have some time set aside to work on these important tasks I need to do. Time blocks can vary in length, from 15 minutes to an hour or more, but the beauty of them is that because you know it's only going to be a finite amount of time constrained on one particular task, you are less likely to divert into doing something else. You can also reward yourself with checking your emails or doing other mundane tasks once time is up.

So does it work for me? Absolutely. I read some advice from Zen Habits on how to organise my emails and process them in batch so that my inbox stays empty, and so far it's working well. As a result, I don't feel stressed that I have to process a whole lot of emails, I don't get interrupted and so I stay focused longer and I don't feel like a slave to my emails.

Occasionally, when someone asked me why I hadn't replied to their email, I had to tell them that I was not checking my emails all the time anymore, but I never encountered resistance or criticism. In fact people are generally surprised, supportive and curious to see if it works, even if they say "it's not for me, I have too much going on, I can't afford to miss my emails".

What about you, how often do you check your emails? Have you ever tried to close Outlook for a while? I'd be interested to know.

The importance of creative briefs

How many times did you work on a marketing project with an agency only to be frustrated with the lack of alignment between what you wanted and what they delivered? That's not too uncommon, and the main reason why this happens so often is that we are so eager to start on a new project that we rush the most important step: planning and briefing.

You might have a very clear idea in your head of what you want, but that doesn't mean that the agency is going to understand it, unless you take the time to clearly detail your brief before starting any work. Whether you have worked with this agency in the past or not, don't skip this very important step. Of course you will most probably meet in person and discuss the project, but nothing beats a well detailed brief on paper: just eliminate any second guessing.

A good agency should have their own brief template so feel free to ask them for a copy. They will be more than happy to help you since it will make their job much easier down the road.

So what goes in a design brief?

The details of the brief depend on the type of project you are working on, but the essentials remain the same.

Background introduction:

Your company, your industry and the need for this project.

Provide as much information about your company: what product or service you offer, who your competition is, what your positioning is, etc.

5 ways to learn Photoshop from scratch

If you are keen to learn photoshop, you can find resources everywhere, from your local bookstore to blogs from the other side of the planet. Whether you just want to understand the basics and be able to resize a photo, or become a photoshop ninja, I can point you to lots of resources, most of which I have used myself. Choose the ones that fit best for you, depending on how much time you have and how much money you want to spend.

1. Learn by doing

The best way to learn how to use a software like Photoshop is to actually start using it right now. Buy a copy of the software, install it and dig into it right away. If you feel overwhelmed and don't know where to start, just open an image with photoshop and play around with the tools that you see. Just use them randomly for a while and browse through the menus, to get a feeling of what happens in the software. Now of course that won't help you much, so the next thing to do is to read the official manual from Adobe by clicking on the Help button. You will be redirected to the online help, in which topics are sorted by category. You can simply start reading and try to apply what you learn as you go.

2. Find resources online

This is where you will find the most resources. There are literally thousands of websites teaching how to use photoshop in one way or another. I will list some of my favorite websites:

Tutorials:

As I mentioned before, the best way to learn is by doing. That's why tutorials are so popular for photoshop. It is much easier to learn how to use photoshop by following a tutorial on one particular topic, step by step, than reading a whole book and then forgetting the first chapter before you even start. Here are some good websites for tutorials:

PSD Tutsplus

By far the best resource for photoshop tutorials. The site has been online for years, and they publish new tutorials every single day. There is also a premium membership for advanced tutorials and special downloads.
Layers Magazine

The website is full of tutorials and articles about the Adobe products. This is the link to the photoshop tutorials.

Smashing Magazine

is another website offering wonderful tutorials.


Photoshop Lady

bookmarks tutorials from the web.

SpoonGraphics

is one of my favorite website, with lots of tutorials and regular roundups for design inspiration.

If you've ever been stuck trying to send a large file by email and getting frustrated that the email would not leave your inbox, or that the recipient's inbox was full and would not allow a 15MB email, then I might have a solution for you.

Dropbox is a web-based storage solution that lets you store and share your files easily. It automatically synchronises a defined "dropbox" folder on your computer so that you can retrieve the files in this folder from anywhere on the web. But the beauty of this solution is that you can install the Dropbox application on your machine, be it a mac or PC and also on your iPhone and iPad, which means that you can find your files instantly on any device.

I would recommend anyone to use Dropbox for personnal or professional use, it's just a life saver and a very productive tool. You can open a free account that will let you store up to 2GB, so no excuse there.

But for now let's go back to our initial problem:

How to send large files with dropbox

When you open an account with dropbox, it automatically creates some folders for you, including the "Public" folder. That's where you want to place the file that needs to be sent. Basically this folder is not password protected, so other people can view its content, but they need to know the exact URL of each file to find it.

Working online:

Navigate to the Public folder.

Select the file you want to share and right-click on it.

Click on "Copy public link".

Copy the URL of the file.

Working on your machine:

Navigate to the Public folder of your Dropbox folder.

Select the file you want to share and right-click on it. In the menu, select Dropbox > Copy public link.

All you need to do now is to send this URL by email to the person you want to share the file with. They won't need any login credentials to access it.

This method works for sending large files but also for sending large folders, all you need to do is compress the folder and send the Zip file.

Of course there are other ways to send large files, by ftp or with services like www.yousendit.com, but Dropbox is one of my favorite since I use it anyway on a daily basis. What's your favorite file sharing method ?

What every marketer should know before ordering prints

Today we are going to talk about printing requirements and in particular what specifications you must discuss with your printing vendor when you ask for a quotation. Even if online marketing is really taking off, meaning that less documents are being printed, many businesses still use a lot of printed material. In my previous company, maybe 80% of our communication collateral was printed because we were selling our products through distributors and small workshops, where large product catalogues and fax orders were still in fashion. I think the days of paper are not gone yet, so for those of you who need to have something printed professionally, I will show you what you need to discuss with your printer to make sure that the result is up to your expectation.

What I will not discuss in this post however is the technical aspect of preparing the documents for print. That will be explained in another post.

Photo by katietower

What do you need to specify?

These are common specifications to be included when you request a quotation from your printer. Depending on the type of project and the partnership you have with your vendor, you might not need to use all of them. If you are not familiar with all these terms and specifications, ask your vendor to give you a small introduction on the various printing techniques. You can also find very comprehensive information on this website.

• Size: what format is your finished document (e.g. A4, 25x12cm)?


• Pages: how many pages are in the document?


• Colors: how many colors will your document print: black and white, full color, or a selection of 2 or 3 colors? Don't forget to include any specific colors you might use (for example using the Pantone Matching System)


• Paper: what type of paper do you need, what color and what thickness?


• Finishing: how should the product be prepared? There are many options to consider:
  
  
  
  • Folding
  
  
  • Binding
  
  
  • Varnish or lamination
  
  
  • Stapling
  
  
  • etc...
  
  
  
  


• Quantities: how many documents do you want to print? It is wise to ask for a couple of options, for example 200, 500 and 1 000 to understand how quantities impact on the final price.


• Versions: specify if you have more than one version of the document to be printed, for example one with prices and one without.


• Packaging: how do you want to product to be delivered: by packs of 50, in bulk, on a pallet, etc..


• Shipping: specify the delivery address and ask for shipping lead time and cost.


• Lead time: what is their turnaround? For larger projects this is very important, printing can take up to 5 weeks and the vendor might need to pre-order the paper for large quantities.


• Planning: for large projects you can also ask your printer to give you a detailed planning of their workflow so that you know when you need to supply them with files, revisions, proofs, etc.


• File format: if you have never worked with the vendor before, make sure you know what file format they expect you to send them (pdf, .tif, etc)

An introduction to design tools for marketers: differences between photoshop, illustrator and indesign.

As a marketer, or a small business owner wearing the marketing hat, you have various options when it comes to creating new communication material. You can simply hire a design agency to create it for you, add a graphic designer to your team, or design it yourself. You might also do a mix of the three, depending on the size of your organisation and the type of project you require. But whether or not you will be designing anything, I am convinced that being aware of the tools on the market, understanding what they can be used for, and knowing the basics of how to use them can offer real benefits. If you work with an agency, it will help you understand their technical jargon when you discuss your projects. If you have a designer in-house it will help you understand what he does. And if you design yourself, well, you obviously need to know the tools. Plus you always need some last minute modifications to an image or a document, and you don't always want to rely on someone else to be there for you.

I started my career as a marketing executive in a small company of less than 20 people. Marketing was being done solely by the CEO himself, with the help of a design agency. I came on-board in a junior role to help him with various activities, like preparing brochures, updating the website, planning for events, etc.. So pretty soon I was involved with the design agency, sending them creative briefs, choosing from their various design drafts, etc. They were very professional and delivered beautiful products, but sometimes we needed less sophistication and faster turnaround. So when we needed to design an invitation for a trade show to be sent by email, I started playing around in Publisher. Yes, publisher, I know... It was not the best, but that's how it all started, from the need to create something quickly and by myself. I then looked for some tools, and slowly learned how to use them by reading tutorials, books and playing with the software. I'm not saying that you need to become an expert in photoshop, but believe me, having some basic skills will save you time and money. So let's dig into it, and have a look at the tools themselves.

The Adobe Creative Suite



Adobe have developed or acquired many software programs along the years, and now offer a full suite of products that help designers produce content for print, web or digital platforms. They are without doubt the standard tools that all designers use, and they integrate beautifully together, with similar interfaces, menus, shortcuts, etc.. If you look at the Adobe website, you'll see dozens of products, but today we will be focusing on the core products you need to know: Photoshop, illustrator, Indesign and Acrobat Pro.



Photoshop

Photoshop is an image editing software, designed to retouch and manipulate photos, although it offers many additional possibilities. When working with Photoshop, you edit what we call a "raster" image, made of millions of pixels, or tiny dots. You can use photoshop for changing colors of a photo, resizing it, cropping it, removing some defaults, changing shapes, cloning elements or making collages. These days, every single photography is processed with photoshop or a similar software before being published. Think of models in glossy magazines, cars in advertising, food on recipe books for example.

Illustrator

Illustrator is a "vector" drawing software. Vector graphics are made of points, lines and curves that are coordinated and calculated mathematically. The key advantage over raster images is that you can scale vector graphics without loosing resolution, or seeing the pixels (see image below). Illustrator is mainly used to create logos, complex shapes, flat images where few colors are used and of course illustrations.



Indesign

Indesign is a desktop publishing software, used mainly to layout documents like brochures, magazines, newsletters and books. Indesign focuses on the layout of the page, the arrangement between text and images and is extremely flexible and precise, ensuring perfect customisation of your document. You can control placement of the header, page number, text flow, in a more robust way than working with Microsoft Word.

Acrobat Pro

Acrobat Pro is not used to create or design anything, but it is part of the product bundle -the Creative Suite- and helps you manage your pdf files very professionally. You can create a pdf file from any document editing software (Word, excel, etc), combine photos into a pdf document, edit an existing pdf, add an interactive form on the document, secure the document digitally, and much more.

Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign have a lot of functions in common and you could sometimes get the same result with one or the other, but it is still useful to understand limitations and key differences. Another detail to point out is that the three tools are often used together in a single project. For example, if I was to design a new brochure for a product, I would retouch the photos of the product in photoshop, create any logo, fancy text or graphic in illustrator, and combine all the elements in Indesign to create the final pdf.

I hope this gave you a good introduction to the famous design tools from Adobe and removed some of the confusion as to which ones you should use. I will go into more details about each software and how to use them in future posts, in the meantime you can find more information on the Adobe website or leave a comment if you have any question.