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

I like to think of myself as a bit of a freak when it comes to keeping things organized. There are a handful of tools in my organizational tool belt, and one of my favorites is Workflowy. If you’re looking for a way to keep all of your planning, thoughts, and ideas in one place, then check out Workflowy. Here’s how the creators of Workflowy describe their app: WorkFlowy is a zoomable document that provides unprecedented flexibility in organizing your ideas. Workflowy is a beautifully designed web app that helps me keep tons of details from falling off my radar. I tend to use it as an outlining tool, often creating agendas…like this: But, outlining just scratches the surface. Once you get under the hood, you’ll discover that Workflowy is capable of so much more. Collaboration and sharing allows you to use Workflowy with others, and tagging allows you to easily group and find items spread out across Workflowy, making it easy to manage large, complicated lists. Tagging is like putting Workflowy’s organizational capabilities on steroids! For me, one of the biggest benefits is that I can quickly grab those random moments of inspiration that would otherwise escape as quickly as they arrive. I also like the “always available” nature of Workflowy; it’s always

Do you value excellence in your organization? You kinda have to answer “Yes” to that question, don’t you? Chris Locurto is one of my go-to leadership experts, and Chris wrote a blog post that explores the idea of excellence. It’s a two-minute read. Give it a look: Excellence is Created, Not Demanded. Here’s one of the points Chris makes: …put a process in place so people have the ability to point out how other team members are being excellent. Let your team brag on each other. Make sure that you’re continuing to share this message with everyone. If you will do this, people will go out of their way to be excellent. The Excellence Award Here’s how we do it at Marketing Ideas For Printers. Whenever someone on our team catches someone doing something right, they present an Excellence Award. It goes like this. If anyone on our team notices excellence, they take an Excellence Award sheet (shown below on our Employee Communications Wire) and fill it out with the award winner’s name and what excellent thing they noticed the winner doing. The person presenting the award calls a company meeting to present the award. We listen to the presentation, clap and whistle

Every so often, I’ll hear one of our Websites For Printers customers get frustrated that their customers just don’t seem to want to embrace ecommerce. One of our customers was, in fact, very adamant in saying his main goal for using his website was simply to act as a tool to encourage customers to start telephone conversations. He was more than happy to accept business online, of course, but his primary objective was to use the website as a conversation-starter for phone calls. That’s how he wants to do business. It’s All About Selling Print There’s nothing wrong with doing business by phone. Orders over the phone turn into profits just as much as orders placed on a website do. Our goal is to make it fun and easy for print buyers to buy printing, and if that means printing is purchased through a phone call which was inspired by a visit to one of our customers’ websites, so be it. Mission accomplished. Landing a phone call that results in a print sale is a worthy goal, but it shouldn’t be considered the only goal. Please forgive me for stating the obvious, but these days website visitors expect to do business on the

DesignEdit’s Ready! Here Are Your Next Steps DesignEdit, the online design tool businesses and consumers love to use to create print-ready design online launches today! Now that DesignEdit is ready for use, here’s what you need to do to make it ready for your customers: Kick the tires on our demo site It wouldn’t hurt to know what the fuss is all about. So first, be sure to check out our own demo to see DesignEdit in action. Just scroll down to the middle of www.websitesforprinters.com/optional-features/designedit/ to view a live sample of what your customers can do with DesignEdit. Skim the documentation Now would be a good time to skim through our Knowledgebase document, How To Use DesignEdit. There are lots of step-by-step instructions in there that guide you through activating the DesignEdit functionality to an order form. No need to actually follow the steps yet (unless you’re feeling adventurous). For now, just get a sense of what the instructions cover. That way, you’ll know where to go if you need them later. Activate DesignEdit on a System order form Okay, now that you know the territory, it’s time to get started. Do you still have “How To Use DesignEdit” open?

Pop quiz: How were you directed to the latest “viral” video or photo online? (Hint: Not through Google!) There once was a time when it seemed like social media was just a fad that could be safely ignored, but those days are far behind now. When it comes to getting your message spread far and wide by your strongest supporters, social media is the engine that powers success. Social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter make it easy for users to share information with friends and other trusted sources, who in turn share that information with their friends. This way, the message spreads from one trusted source to another, ensuring that it’s always…well, trusted. Search Engine Optimization may help potential customers find your website; but social media not only brings people to your website, it keeps them connected with your organization so that they keep coming back for more! To stay connected with your customers, though, you have to say something. And that may be the most difficult part of doing social media properly — how do you keep coming up with something to share? Don’t worry, we have you covered. Our social media content engine, The Buzz, automatically supplies

Would you use a hammer to cut a slice of bread? Would you use a screwdriver to inflate your tires? Of course not! So, you wouldn’t use a personal profile to promote your business on Facebook, would you? It’s important to use the right tool for the job, and Facebook is no different. So if you want to promote your business on Facebook, you want to make sure you’re using the right tool: a Business Page. Here are some important features that are available to you through a business page that simply aren’t available through a standard personal page: Professionalism: Personal pages used for business are seen by users as unprofessional. Not a good way to introduce yourself to the social markets. Unlimited Friends: Did you know personal pages have a friend limit? Business pages don’t have any limits to the number of friends (fans) they can have — the sky’s the limit! Access to Facebook Insights: Facebook has a powerful, built-in analytics tool specifically designed for business pages. You have no idea what kind of impact your personal page has…but you can find out everything about your business page’s impact! Advertising: Having a business page gets you access to

The members of our development team are some of our most highly sought-after resources, so we closely guard the time available to them. While we don’t make our development schedule publicly available, we thought you might find the process we use to determine their projects kind of interesting. Here’s how we decide what our development team works on. We started a new system this year that has worked well for us, called the Weekly Sprint. It goes like this: Weekly Sprint Each week we use the Weekly Sprint to provide a process which will allow us to rapidly develop projects and concepts in a manner that keeps the team fully informed and unified. The development team’s focus each week is divided into two priorities: Items that are Important and Urgent (Quadrant 1) Items that are Important, but Not Urgent (Quadrant 2) Our desire is to focus on Quadrant 2 items, but Quadrant 1 items will always take priority. Each Weekly Sprint has three components: The Warmup, the Sprint, and The Cooldown. The Warmup The team leader will bring 10 projects to each Weekly Sprint meeting. The strong bias for the projects selected will favor our customers, the print buyers. A

This week our support team fielded a request from one of our customers concerning the purchase of an additional domain name. Our customer had been approached by an opportunistic domain name broker / reseller offering to sell the domain name SomethingSimilarToTheirs.com. (Well, not that domain name, but you know what we mean! If our customer’s domain name was AcmePrintingUSA.com, the broker was offering a variation like Acme-Printing-USA.com.) Aaron (on our support team) provided an answer that’s accurate and entertaining. Here it is: Hi Joe, My recommendation would be to save your money and stick with the domain name you have. Instead, focus on politely asking your vendors, customers, chamber of commerce and local business blogs to link to your site. And here’s the long explanation why: Domain names have an increasingly small (if no) effect on rankings, in part because it is so easy to attempt to manipulate search engine rankings with them. For instance, if you want the world to know that you have the world’s best cookie recipe, you could just register worldsbestcookierecipe.com and expect the search-engine traffic to come rolling in. But what if you don’t actually have the world’s best cookie recipe? Google’s view is that

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