Tips Archives - Page 3 of 4 - Marketing, content, & technology to help printers sell more printing

Websites, Ideas Collection, Add Drama and Depth with White Balance, Marketing Ideas For Printers

Have you ever struggled to take a classy (yet natural) picture? Or photographed an incredible wilderness scene, only to be sorely disappointed by flat results? If the world has so much wonder, why is capturing that majesty so difficult? Many photos are simply too dark or too light, with awkward shadows, blinding background rays, or glaring reflections. The color can seem artificial or just washed out. But photos with proper lighting come alive, creating a drama and depth that resonates with viewers on a heart-stirring level. NOT TOO HOT, NOT TOO COLD: BALANCE THAT IS JUST RIGHT The latest Tech Tip added to the Ideas Collection of every website provided by Marketing Ideas For Printers helps your customers learn to edit photos so the perfect hues of light and color come forth. Here’s what they will learn: Adobe Lightroom is an inexpensive post-processing program used by designers worldwide. In the past, developing exquisite images required excellent photos, nuanced darkroom abilities, and expensive equipment. In contrast, Lightroom allows even beginners to normalize light tones they weren’t able to land in-camera. This new Tech Tip will provide your website visitors with several steps to get them started: Be aware of the white-balance

Have you ever tried to land that big corporate account, only to have your prospect ask if you can provide a private “storefront” website for their employees to buy from? Did you have to say “no” and lose the prospect? With Private Label Websites from Marketing Ideas For Printers, you can set up your clients for success by saying “yes” and win those big corporate contracts again and again! Create the Perfect Purchasing Experience By proactively creating Private Label Websites for your corporate customers, you provide their employees with all the convenient features of your website’s regular online storefront, except it’s customized to fit their own branding. Their employees get a purchasing experience that fits right in with the rest of their corporate intranet, and you get to enjoy the steady stream of sales that come along with those big accounts. Our most successful printer customers use Private Label Websites as the “ace up their sleeve” to land their biggest prospects. Using our convenient set-up tools, they can build a custom-tailored Private Label Website in ten minutes, with no programming experience needed! They don’t just tell their prospects they can deliver–they show them! Make Switching Not Worth It For Your

Ideas Collection, Websites, Marketing Ideas For Printers, Reignite Creativity with Ideation Thinking

What does it take to beat back the ordinary and continually release fresh, gripping, beautiful design? A little creative thinking. The newest Design Tip added to the Ideas Collection of every website provided by Marketing Ideas For Printers offers powerful exercises to help your customers design imaginatively. Communicate Without Words Based on the Design Matters series, the “ideation” strategy will help your customers and designers create work that is not only aesthetically appealing, but strategy-driven and smart. Ideation techniques enable the use of the very best images to clearly communicate ideas without words. When your customers view this month’s article on your website, it will walk them through image gathering, group brainstorming options, visual matrix exercises, and even “productive doodling” to help them capture the essence of their message in simple, nonverbal ways. Metaphorical thinking challenges consideration of questions like: What attributes are we trying to communicate through this piece? How do we want people to feel when they look at the graphics/design? Why do certain images evoke that (particular) emotional response? How can these images be woven into a project? See how your customers can push themselves with these new ideation strategies by viewing this tip on one of

The end of January is looming. For many people, that means that all the excitement of those fresh New Year’s resolutions is quickly fading, if not already forgotten. That’s okay. You can still finish the year strong with the Calibration Method, a surprising new approach to productivity developed by our very own Aaron Simmons. The Calibration Method is perfect for when you’re frustrated with your lack of progress on another year’s resolutions. According to Aaron, The Calibration Method is the perfect tool for anybody that finds themselves in a rut and needs a way out, especially when they begin to fear there may not be a way out! Instead of focusing on goals, the Calibration Method focuses on becoming the “Best Possible Version of You.” That is, if you were always to make the best use of your time, always live up to your potential, and end each day with no regrets, what would you be doing, and how would you think and act? That’s the best possible version of you! With the best possible version of you defined, you then work through a simple, four-step daily cycle that trains you to become that person: 1. Review your definition of

Meet Sal. When it comes to search engine expertise, she’s one of the most influential people I know! Sal has an “insider’s view” to exactly how search engines work, and I’ve had the opportunity to work with her firsthand for several years now. Sal has a knack for knowing exactly what makes a website appealing from a search engine’s perspective from the moment she first visits a website. Today, I’ll share some of Sal’s top suggestions on what you can do to keep your website in tip-top shape for search engines. Act Like a Human Sal is quick to point out that websites are, first and foremost, used by people. Because websites are used by people, search engines give preference to websites that are written to focus on a human audience. Contrast that with the earlier days of the internet. Search engines were very functional in their approach to the websites they visited, and search engines gave preference to websites that functioned well. Functionality is still important, of course; all of your links need to work, and your pages need to load without errors. But search engines are much smarter now. Search engines prefer websites that are not only friendly to web

Email, the greatest productivity enhancer since the beginning of time! Yeah, right… I look at email all day long. (Well, I intentionally turn it off sometimes to keep it from becoming a distraction, but that’s a post for another time.) At the end of a solid day of work, the last thing I want to do is look at any more emails. Yuck! Email at Home So what do I do when I get home? Anything but check my email. When I ignore my home email, I always have this little twinge of fear that I may have missed something important. I don’t think my fear is full-blown FOMO, but I do worry about missing that all-important note from school that says an after-school activity has been cancelled, which means there’s a chance my son is standing all alone on a sidewalk somewhere wondering why no one is picking him up. Back to email. One of the reasons I get so weary of checking my email at home is because our family email account has become a collection bin for every digital thing we’ve ever been exposed to: Digital receipts from the department store, reminders from the dentist, a notice that someone new is

Earlier this summer, my family took a fun vacation to the beautiful Black Hills area of South Dakota. One of the best parts of going on that vacation actually happened before I even left, when I received this note from Rachel, my personal assistant: “Let me know if you need to touch base on anything before your vacation or if I can help you out with anything additional while you’re gone. We need to make sure your brain doesn’t float back this direction for a whole week, so be sure to let me know what I can carry while you’re away.” How wonderful is that?!? Rachel is my secret weapon. She helps keep things manageable, and allows me to take worry-free vacations. I Don’t Like Auto-Responders I don’t know about you, but I always cringe a little bit when I send an email and instantly get a vacation/out of the office auto-responder email. They always sound like this to me: Thanks for sending your email. I care about you, but I don’t care enough to make sure that your email gets handled properly when I’m gone. After all, I’m on vacation and I’m not worrying about anything! So, if you think you still need some

Every day at Marketing Ideas For Printers we have a daily check-in meeting. According to Patrick Lencioni, this meeting is one of the kinds of meetings found in healthy organizations. In his book The Advantage, Lencioni explains why these daily check-in meetings are so important and effective: It’s about the team getting into the habit of gathering once a day, for no more than ten minutes, to clear the air about anything administrative that would be helpful to know. Schedules. Events. Issue alerts. That kind of stuff. The most powerful impact of having teams meet every day is the quick resolution of minor issues that might otherwise fester and create unnecessary busywork for the team. We put a little twist on this daily check-in meeting by adding a simple twelve-dollar microphone and calling it our Microphone Meeting. The microphone helps emphasize who’s turn it is to talk, and makes sure everyone has the opportunity to be heard. To make sure the meeting moves efficiently, we follow these simple rules: Anyone can start the meeting by picking up the microphone. If you have the microphone, you have the floor. Once you’re done, pass the microphone to the person next to you (either direction). If you’d like another turn

Do you send emails to prospects, customers, and colleagues in time zones other than your own? Here’s a simple tip that will help prevent timing mistakes and misunderstandings. A Simple Way to Present Time It’s so simple you might be overlooking it. Ready? Here it is: Whenever you send an email to someone in a different time zone, and you mention a specific time, make sure you reference the time in both time zones. Let’s start with this simple message: It would be an easy improvement to provide a time zone for a common point of reference, like this: However, if you’re the one in the Central time zone, that’s lazy. You’ve made it clear what time you’ll be calling in your time zone, but you’re still leaving it up to the recipient to have to figure out the time conversion to their time zone. If they don’t do time conversions regularly, there’s always a chance that they’ll make a mistake and convert in the wrong direction. You don’t want that happening! A Better Way to Present Time You can do better. Here’s how the message might look when both time zones are mentioned. It’s that simple! When you present both time zones no one has to guess

There’s a lot of noise out there in the world of social media, and it can be downright difficult to stand out in the sea of noise! But, it’s not impossible. Here’s a tip that will help increase the odds of landing in your Facebook followers’ timelines with more frequency: Add some video! The next time you’re ready to add content to Facebook, make a video introduction. Here’s a basic step-by-step walkthrough of the process. Shoot a Good Video Introduction It all starts with a good video. Notice I said a good video, not a perfect video. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds and aim for perfect. Usually perfect is a good thing, but in this case good is acceptable because the purpose of the video is simply to lead the greatest number of visitors possible to the content you’re highlighting. It’s easier than ever to make a good video these days. Smart phones and any number of inexpensive digital devices are all up to the task. You won’t get perfect video, but you will get good video. Facebook loves video content, so it makes sense that if you can get the attention of Facebook, then Facebook will reciprocate and present your video (and the content it’s introducing) to more of your followers. Remember

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