Newsletter Writer’s Block
Anyone who’s been in charge of writing content for a newsletter can feel my pain. I’ve been trying to brainstorm some topics for our Reseller Newsletter, and I’m drawing a blank. While I’ve got a ton lined up for our Affiliate Newsletter, the topics just don’t cross over.
A reseller is defined as “A person who is authorized to sell someone else’s goods and/or services.” We definitely have tons, but what do these people want to know about? What good tips and advice can be given to a graphic designer or print broker looking for a resource on how to resell printing?
I admit – I’m new to writing a newsletter. I’ve often thought about starting one for my other sites, but what would I talk about month after month? It’s sometimes hard enough to come up with blog topics, let alone an entire extremely focused newsletter. I give those e-mail affiliate marketers out there a lot of credit.
I’m officially open to suggestions! Let’s do some online brainstorming here in the comments. What would you want to know more about if in this position?
Read MoreHOW Conference Post-Game Show
Well I’m back in the Pacific Standard Time Zone after 4 days in Boston. To date, it’s safe for me to say that the HOW Design Conference has been the best for PsPrint to attend so far! About 80% of people stopping by our booth had never heard of us before, which isn’t necessarily bad. This has been a relatively untapped resource for us, and we excitedly passed out samples of our printing, paper stocks, and information on the Reseller Program.
A neat feature of this show was that the expo hall wasn’t open the entire day – we only had to staff the booth from 8-9 am, 12-2 pm, and then 5-6:30p on Monday only. I believe the “Resource Center” hours (their moniker) were set this way to avoid stepping on the toes of too many special sessions. The real star of this conference is, of course, the educational sessions for designers. The expo hall is just a bonus for vendors to be able to toss some marketing voodoo at a prime audience.
I think we’ll definitely go back next year to the HOW Conference, being held in Austin, TX. Of all the trade shows I’ve been to as a representative of PsPrint, this was by far the most successful. Everything arrived on time, our booth looked great, and the audience was truly interested in what we have to offer. Overall, a great feeling!
Of course, I had to visit Faneuil Hall & Cheers, and did take some pictures that I’ll share tomorrow once I pull them off my camera. My hotel (pictured above) was pretty decent for a Best Western, and I have some tips & such to share about Boston for those of us going back for Affiliate Summit East in August. But that, my friends, I’ll leave for another day.
Read MoreMake Your Business Bloom with PsPrint
Lots of good sales going on this month at PsPrint. The sales are in full swing for spring and it’s time to get the word out about your business. Over the last few months I’ve been reposting some great articles from the PsPrint website about using print marketing to your advantage, so these sales are an awesome time to take advantage of that advise.
- 20% off Brochures
- Brochures are the fastest way for your clients to look up information about your business in a convenient matter without the aid of your website.
- Brochure Printing Made Easy
- Branding with a Shoestring Budget
- 50 4″ x 6″ Postcards for just $14.95
- With prices like these, even the smallest business can promote their products or services. Postcards are also great inexpensive alternatives to party or event invitations. With such a low price for such a small quantity, any mother can send postcards for a proud graduation party.
- Top Six Mistakes to Avoid in Any Postcard Marketing Campaign
- Ninja Marketing Tactics – Postcards
- 5 Proven Tips for Powerful Postcard Marketing
- 15% off Rack Cards
- Rack Cards provide travelers not familiar with the area with highlights of local sights and attractions in hotel lobbies around the country. Rack Cards can effectively advertise restaurants and shops as well to an audience wide open to suggestion.
How NOT to behave at a trade show
Recently I attended the California Association of REALTORS® Expo in Anaheim, CA. This was my first time attending a true trade show for real estate professionals, but not my first trade show ever. And unbelievably, I saw a lot of tactics that worked to draw people into your booth and some tactics that were shockingly inappropriate.
It seems to be common sense that you’d want to put your best foot forward at any trade show you attend. Not only common sense, but it’s smart marketing. A company is spending anywhere between $5000 and $8000 to exhibit at a trade show, taking into consideration the basic booth set up, decor, marketing materials, travel expenses, trade show services, and man hours. So it seems like a no brainer that you’d want to not only put your best foot forward in terms of materials, giveaways, and booth furniture and displays, but also send the best employees you have as well.
At first I thought it was a pet peeve that the exhibitors in the booth besides ours were annoying me. But after talking to my fellow representatives of PsPrint working in the booth with me, I found it was not just my imagination running away from me. We had your basic 10×10 booth space, and so did the mortgage company that shall remain nameless next to us. We had three people conservatively staffing the booth… and even with three of us, a 6′ long table full of print samples on one corner, and a square podium with a monitor and laptop to show off our website on the other, it was a bit tight at times maneuvering around each other.
This company had no less than 10 people staffing
their booth. 10! And they were different people every day, so they were coming in fresh with nothing but possibly a coworker’s recap on the day beforehand, if that. They also, being a well known mortgage brand, had a big booth display set up, which took up room, and a TV running their commercials, a high table with freebies and marketing information, and two-three chairs in the booth. There was nil in the way of room for them to get around each other within the confines of their booth, so of course they spilled out into the aisles.
That was when I began to have a problem. Not only were they in the aisles like street team promoters, but a few took a shining to hanging out directly in front of our web display podium, at times even leaning on it while chatting up attendees passing through. Not only did this bug me a lot being that they were blocking a pretty integral part of our display set up, but it just irked me in terms of decorum as well. As a representative of my company, yes I’m trying to get passers-by interested enough to stop by my booth and take a look at what we have to offer and let me bend their ear a bit. Of course we’re all there for the bottom line – sales. But never would I go stand in front of someone else’s booth and try to recruit attendees to my cause. It smacks of shady business dealings and just lack of concern.
In doing a quick Google search to check to make sure I wasn’t overreacting in believing this to be rude behavior on the part of our neighboring booth staff, I found a blog post online titled Trade Show Etiquette written at Big-Images.com. Okay I admit, I’m guilty of sitting and, at this last show, eating. I’m a relative newbie in the trade show circuit, so I’m learning still and I can almost guarantee you that I won’t be doing either of those two behaviors again next month at NAR’s Expo.
At one point my coworker even shooed a rep away from in front of our podium because he needed to show a prospective client something and this other rep was chatting someone up while leaning shamelessly on a piece of OUR booth display. And he had the nerve to shoot back a dirty look. Why would anyone think that’s acceptable behavior? It’s loitering if it’s outside a shop, but okay if it’s outside another exhibitor’s booth? I don’t know about any of the attendees feelings getting grappled by these representatives of the mortgage company, but as a fellow exhibitor I’d be hard pressed to ever use this company when the time comes for me to finally buy a home, based solely on their reactions.
I wish I could say that said mortgage company was the worst example of trade show etiquette I saw there, but it wasn’t. There were a few sign companies selling message riders for the yard signs, and most were pretty calm. But upon walking around the show floor just to check it out, a coworker and I literally had a guy jump out in front of us holding a huge message rider sign like a barricade shouting something about low prices or something. At that rate I wasn’t paying attention to his product, his pitch, his company name, Nada. Just the fact that he literally blocked our path and we had to side step to get around him.
If the Sprint guy at the mall yells out to you check them out, but you have a Verizon phone and you’re happy with it, do you stop? You certainly don’t pull a U turn and listen to his entire pitch. It’s rude, no matter how you slice it. And incredibly poor marketing tactics of that particular representative of that company.
So if I could give you one tip for the future, pay attention to who you send to a trade show to represent your company. If you’re going to a trade show, make sure you know how to act. Think about the show from an attendee stand point if you get the urge to jump out at anyone like a beggar on the street asking for spare change. And stay in your own booth.
Read MoreTurning Gray at 26?
While brushing my hair this morning I found not one but three gray hairs. It’s hard to tell the color of a single hair, it almost looked blond… but considering that my hair is naturally a dark brown, I sorta doubt they were blond.
Has the stress gotten to me already? My coworkers have joked that I’m no longer allowed to take Vacations because the rely on my being here so much (although this is something they joke about every time I take some time off for any reason…) And since returning from Sin City, the work load on my desk has been seemingly endless. I’ve been here two and a half extra hours each night trying to catch up before Labor Day, and with it also being the end of the month I have EOM reporting coming up to worry about as well.
What happened to the days when I just came in, did my job, and went home? I guess in the days of mailing services, marketing, advertising, sales, social media, the affiliate program, and email marketing there’s no sleep for the weary. It took me half a day just to catch up on Twitter posts and all the blogs I subscribe to through Google Reader. I’ve perhaps spent more time here at PsPrint than home in the last few days.
In case you’re wondering, I did enjoy my vacation. Some of the highlights included a helicopter tour over the strip at night, seeing Penn & Teller live and getting photos with them and their autographs, seeing lots of animals, going very high up at the top of the Stratosphere tower and the Paris Las Vegas Eiffel Tower, and traipsing all over Las Vegas Blvd. My travel friend and I basically saw everything we went to Vegas wanting to see, except we missed out on the Tournament of Kings dinner show at Excalibur. I think when I go back to Vegas in November to attend the National Association of Realtors’ conference, I might take an evening to head over there. I wasn’t quite ready to re-join reality!
Fever… in the morning… fever all through the night.
According to my handy dandy Weatherbug extension for Firefox, it’s a toasty 71.8° outside. And you have no idea how proud of myself I am that I remembered the HTML code for the degree sign without having to look it up online.
It’s that kind of afternoon here at the office… it’s quiet, a little too quiet. There’s some kind of big meeting going on in the conference room, which no doubt will somehow trickle into more work for us underlings. Because our conference room has the worst circulation of any conference room, they’ve borrowed my fan to help make it more bearable in there. No, I wasn’t using it, but I could use it about now. But that’s how it always goes, isn’t it?
Most of the projects I’ve been working on are either done or on hold pending someone else’s end of their bargain. In some ways it’s a nice place to be… I’ve done most of my share and the hard work. In other ways, it’s the worst… because I’d rather get this all taken care of and over with than be waiting on someone else’s contribution.
But then again, I never did like group projects in school… I was the kid that always got stuck with 90% of the work. I realized in college that most of the time I’d taken over a project, it wasn’t necessarily because everyone else in my group were slackers, it was sometimes because I just thought I could do a better job than them. So once, I sat back… I knew the best thing I could do for the project was write the paper that was turned in after the presentation. Instead, I let someone else do that and I took the easiest job there was… keeping the notes from our meetings that had to be turned into the professor too.
Every group in the class got an A. Our group got a C (which I’m tragically still plotting ways how to appeal 4 years later). The reason was that the person who wrote the paper was not a very adept writer, so almost all of the points we had deducted came from the paper part. Go figure… I learned my lesson that day.
I digress. Most of what I’ve been working on is standard management of the mailing services program here at PsPrint and making sure the affiliate program doesn’t implode upon itself. So far, so good! We launched new sales today… $100 off Brochures and 25% off Premium Business Cards. Launching sales doesn’t really have much to do with me though, beyond updating affiliates and giving them new creative to use, which again is one of those things I have to wait on someone else for.
Since it’s past time for me to leave, it looks like the waiting game shall continue until tomorrow…
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