News Archives - Page 5 of 10 - Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

Let’s get the play on words straight right from the start. Moderately Confused is a cartoon, and it’s been added to all Websites For Printers websites! Here are a few samples: Moderately Confused is described as: A whimsical, slice-of-life view into life’s fool-hardy moments. That pretty much nails it! You’ll find the Moderately Confused cartoon in the Fun@Work section of your website, which is promoted through the Printer@Work email newsletter. Here’s where you can view more Moderately Confused cartoons, on one of our Websites For Printers public demo websites. We love all the cartoons in Fun@Work; they provide fun, “sticky” content that always entertains website visitors! Keen eyes that visit Fun@Work will notice something missing: the cartoon Kit ‘n’ Caryle is no longer in the lineup because its creator, Larry Wright, has retired. In its place, we welcome Moderately Confused to our content lineup! You’ll love this stream of fresh comedic content, but there’s so much more. Did you know there are over 78 pages of content added to Websites For Printers website every single month? Check out the complete content lineup found on Websites For Printers websites.

Lemons are no fun unless you can turn them into lemonade. We encountered a lemon recently when something indestructible, the email notification system in Websites For Printers websites, broke. Well, nothing in life is ever fully indestructible, but of everything out there, email notifications from our websites are about as close as you can get. Reliable is a term that could easily be associated with those email notifications. So much so, that many of our clients come to rely very heavily on those notifications – it’s the trigger that lets our website customers know something is happening on their website and it’s time to spring into action. On the rare occasion that there really is a hiccup in that system, the team here at Marketing Ideas For Printers makes sure that those notifications get back to normal as soon as possible. That lemon occurred on Monday, September 14th. The notifications stopped flowing from the servers, and our team sprang into action to alert our clients to that fact and recommend that they keep a close eye on their workflow page for any activity (new orders, approved proofs, etc.). While that approach works for the rare instances when it’s needed, it left us feeling that there

Times have really changed. It used to be that PayPal lacked a certain credibility. It was often associated with homemade websites, and thought of as the Band-Aid way to get money from customers online when you couldn’t do it the “real” way. But PayPal is all grown up now, and while PayPal still fits its early niche as a payment option that can be easily adapted for sites (often in the business-to-consumer space) that need a quick e-commerce solution, it also has gained enough credibility to be used as a trusted business-to-business payment method as well. It’s from that backdrop that we can now say that PayPal is a supported payment option on Websites For Printers websites! If you’d like to offer PayPal as a payment method to your customers, here’s how you do it: Connect PayPal to Your Website You’ll first need to make sure your website is set up to use the Ecommerce Suite. Once that has been activated, all you need to do is follow these simple steps: If you haven’t already done so, set up an account at PayPal.com Once you have a PayPal account, go to your website’s Control Center and click “My Website” from

Readers of this blog most likely know Mike Stevens, the founder of Marketing Ideas For Printers. What you may not know is that Mike was recently diagnosed with a very aggressive form of Leukemia called Acute Myloid Leukemia. I’ve had the privilege and honor of working closely with Mike and learning from him throughout my whole career. If you know Mike … or even simply observe him from a distance … you know he cares deeply about people. Mike is an encourager. Now, as he battles Leukemia, it’s time for the encouragement to go the other way. It’s time for us to rally around Mike and provide encouragement to him. Here’s how you can provide Mike with some instant encouragement: Call the Encouragement Hotline at 1-877-344-1965 *. You’ll be prompted to leave a message. As soon as you’re done leaving your message of encouragement, it will be instantly emailed to Mike for him to listen to as he’s able. Please take a moment, and leave a message of encouragement for Mike today by calling theEncouragement Hotline at 1-877-344-1965 *. Dave Hultin, Marketing Ideas For Printers Pleasant words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones. — Proverbs 16:24 (NASB) * Update! Mike is doing much

Graph Expo will be here before you know it … the show runs September 13-16, 2015, in Chicago’s McCormick Place Conference Center. We’ll be there in Booth 457, ready to visit with you. Plus, we can get you in the doors of McCormick Place for free! We have a limited number of free, exhibits-only passes for you (a $45 value), available until August 28, 2015. Marketing Ideas For Printers provides the websites, direct mail advertising, social media marketing, and email marketing technology that helps printers sell more printing. We can help you, too! Graph Expo Show Special Here’s a sneak peek at a show special we’ll be unveiling at Graph Expo. We’ll waive the monthly fee for new customers on all Marketing Ideas For Printers services until January 1, 2016! This show special starts when Graph Expo opens on September 13, 2015. At that time, we’ll waive monthly fees for the rest of the year for all new customers using The Buzz (Social Media Marketing), Ink Inc. (Direct Mail Marketing), ezMail (Email Marketing), and of course a website from Websites For Printers. You can get a head-start on the show special for the Websites For Printers website by starting your own personal Websites For Printers demo website right now!

You may have recently received an email from Authorize.net that contains all kinds of geeky information, like this: Important Authorize.Net Networking Change Over the coming months, Authorize.Net will be upgrading access to the Internet connections that serve our data centers. Instead of allowing direct connections, all Internet traffic will be routed through Akamai, a third-party cloud network service that routes and delivers Internet traffic. There’s a lot more to the email, and it’s not very exciting unless you enjoying writing code for a living. (Even so, if you’re interested in reading the news, you can do so here.) If you’re a client of Websites For Printers, and use the ecommerce tools that allow you to connect with Authorize.net for online payments, you don’t have to worry. Our team has already been working on all necessary changes, you can sit back and relax. That’s one of the biggest benefits of using Websites For Printers as your website provider. When geeky stuff like this hits, you can rest easy knowing we’ve got you covered. Don’t worry about how Authorize.net’s networking changes will impact your day, just keep on selling more printing!

One of my favorite times of each week is when coworkers share their weekly Highs and Lows with me. It’s a pretty simple ritual: I send out an email to all of the Marketing Ideas For Printers coworkers on Friday morning sharing one of the high points of the week, and a low point. I then ask the coworkers to do the same and share their highs and lows with me. The topics could be anything! The topics are often work-related, but they don’t have to be. In fact, it’s often the personal stuff that provides the greatest insight into each team member’s “mental energy” for the week. Send Publicly, Receive Privately My highs and lows go out publicly for everyone on the team to see, but the replies from my team come back privately to me. This, of course, helps encourage more open and honest feedback from the team. I also make a habit of including at least one additional “High” … I want to make sure that “High” always wins in the battle of High and Low! Don’t Forget to Add This There’s one more important step to do to make the most out of this weekly ritual. When I

At the last printing conference I attended, I heard over and over again the printing industry referred to as a mature industry. It wasn’t always said in words as clear as that, but if you listened close enough, that’s what you heard. That can be pretty scary. It sounds so dead-end, and frankly, discouraging. On the other hand, if you switch your thoughts for a moment and think about sporting events, when the camera is panning the crowd, who gets the attention and ends up on the big screen? It’s the guys with no shirts in the freezing cold weather. It’s the fans with the crazy clothes that your Mom would never let you wear in public. It’s the kid dancing as if there was no one one watching. Who’s getting the attention? Not people you would think of as mature. No, it’s the fans that are acting immature! So, if printing is considered a mature industry, how should you act? Should you accept things as they’ve always been and stay where things are comfortable? Or, should you show up to work and start a new dance craze like the kid on the big screen? No, let’s not go there…please!

When I first started talking about Building Sales With Your Digital Dialog, I discussed how the real version of you is complimented by the online version of you. When your customers opt to buy their printing from your website, is the online version of you as engaging as the real you? That’s certainly an important part of the Digital Dialog, but before that dialog can even start, you need to build trust. Without trust, your prospects and customers may not even start the online conversation. So, the million dollar question is: “How do you build trust online?” Beautiful Visual Design May I share a secret with you? There was a time in my life I thought beautiful website design was for the “other guys.” You know, big names like Apple, GMC, and Nike, to name just a few. As long as your website looked “acceptably” good, that’s all that mattered. After all, if you’re faced with the choice of making your website look great or work great, then “work great” wins, right? The truth is, you need both. You need a website that’s both functional and beautiful. It’s convenient to repeat the tired, old phrase, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Deep down, though, we all know that’s

We have a small, yet powerful update for printers using uDesignIt! on Websites For Printers websites. Your customers can now have their physical address information auto-fill the form for document personalization. Business cards provide the perfect case study. Up to this point with uDesignIt!, the website has used your customer’s account information (name, phone number, email address, etc.) to pre-populate information in the document being personalized. A pre-populated order form with a preview of the finished document looks something like this: But, notice there’s something missing: the address information. The difficulty comes when your customer’s account contains multiple addresses. For example, they may have a work address and a home address associated with their account. Which address information should the website use to pre-populate the order form? Now, your customer can decide! Here’s what happens: If there’s only one address in the customer’s account, it’s pretty straightforward; the website uses that address. However, if there are multiple addresses associated with the customer’s account, the website will default to the last address used and allow the customer to select a different address. Here’s a short 30-second video that shows how it all comes together. It’s ridiculously simple for your customers to use, and the best part is, it’s

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