If you have ever stayed at a hotel, chances are you have seen the door hangers that say do not disturb.  This simple printed sign delivers a message from you to the person who might be coming to clean your room.  For decades door hangers have proven themselves a useful and effective form of communication and now some businesses are utilizing these cost effective tools as part of their companies marketing strategy.  When people check the mail and find envelope upon envelope of offers from various companies most people throw the whole stack in the trash without giving them a second glance.

Target Market with Door Hangers

Using door hangers for your target marketing will put your brands image literally at people’s fingertips.  Your potential customers will not have to open an envelope to see what you’re selling.  Your products information will be right there on their front door instead of clumped together in the mail box with dozens of other companies’ information.  Here are a few tips and possible companies who can benefit from creating a custom door hanger to promote their business.

You should think of a door hanger as a durable, easy to save, business card.  These rectangular two sided marketing materials can deliver information and get potential customers attention but they are also useful as a reminder that can be easily stored in people’s homes to provide them with your information the future.  When you are creating the design for your door hanger you want to include an image that will make people want to know more about your company.

One or Two-Sided?

Most professional printers offer two sided door hangers.  If you have lots of information to communicate you should consider including all of the text intensive design on one side of the hanger and utilize the other side for a more eye-popping graphic based design like your company’s logo or a simple clever slogan and graphic.  If you are promoting your business near a holiday turn your door hanger into a holiday themed decoration that people are likely to hang on an interior door in their home.  If you hanger is visible during a holiday party, not only will you have raised your brands visibility with the host but all of their guests will see your marketing tool as well.

A Marketing Tool for All Businesses

Door hangers also make great tools for new local businesses or local businesses that are trying to reach out and inform potential new customers about changes that have recently taken place.  Everyone like coupons and what better way to reach out and invite people to come check out your business than hanging a door hanger with a coupon on their front door?  This is especially effective for new restaurants or service oriented businesses that are trying to encourage new customers to try them out for the first time.  Including a coupon on your door hanger is also a great way to track the effectiveness of your door hanger marketing campaign.  If you keep track of the number of people who come into your business with one of your door hanger coupons, you will have an idea about how many people your campaign reached.

Conquest Graphics offers high quality printed door hangers and other forms of direct marketing printing. They have 85 years of experience in the printing industry.

Best Buy has really outdone themselves in the customer service arena. I received in the mail a $50 gift card and a letter from Best Buy. Please see the photo of the letter below. In the letter they state that they know I purchased a HD-DVD player and since Toshiba will no longer be producing HD DVD players the stuidos will not be releasing any more movies in the HD DVD format. Blu-ray technology beat HD DVD.

They go on to write, “…you have purchase a HD DVD player and as a result we are sening you a Best Buy gift card to treat yourself.” Additionally they end with this bit of good news, “If you are interested in trading in your HD DVD player and HD DVDs, you can visit BestBuyTradeIn.com where we accept HD DVD hardware…for addtional Best Buy gift cards base on its market value.”

Well, kudos to Best Buy and be safe in the knowledge that you have a customer for life. Like I needed another reason to not visit Circuit City. So if you were like me and bet on the wrong horse and bought a HD DVD player from Best Buy you may be receiving a gift card in the mail.

When Best Buy writes, “We truly appreciate you as a customer,” I believe them.

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From my experience public speaking is one of the most difficult things you can do, much less prepare for. I am the founder and president of a company which requires me to speak to people on a weekly basis. Of course I am usually speaking to a smaller number of people, maybe two to five at a time.

There are rare occasions when I must speak to more and then there is usually a podium, a stage and a presentation involved. I can speak effortlessly and intelligently to two to five people. But when it grows to 20 or more, well then I get nervous. Luckily for me it passes quickly and after five minutes I’m into the flow and all goes well. Still, it helps to do some things ahead of time to make the journey from nervous stutterer to polished speaker. Here are some things I’ve learned that may help you if you are ever called on to speak in front of a group of people.

Make Notes
Everyone losses their train of thought sometimes and making notes can save you from that awkward pause as you stare into the ceiling trying to remember what the heck you were saying. Notes can keep you on task and remind you of important points to make. Don’t read from your note cards, but don’t be afraid to look at them if you need help. And be sure you have practiced with them…many times.

Practice, Practice, Practice
I practice my presentations at least a dozen times. Considering my presentations, with Powerpoint slides, last over an hour that is a lot of my time. But I’m ready and confident when I’m on stage and that makes it worthwhile. Practice with an audience of family or friends if you have to, but be sure you get an honest critique at some point.

Expect The Worst
Most likely things will go smooth, but imagine what might go wrong and be ready when it does. It is entirely wrong to try and avoid thinking about what could go wrong, how else will you prepare for it, if you ignore the possibility. This way, if it happens, you are ready. Finally, if yo think about what could go wrong I think you will see that, in reality, it won’t be the end of the world.

Get Relaxed
Sure, I know what you are thinking. How can I relax, I’ve got to speak in front of X number of people. What I mean is get rid of other sources of stress. Be sure to get plenty of sleep. Have your clothes picked out ahead of time. If traveling, make sure all the arrangements have been made. Do something your enjoy the day or night before, watch a comedy or whatever relaxes you.

Body Language
Nothing says I don’t know what I’m doing than having your head down, shoulders slumped and poor posture. Keep your head up, chin level with the floor and for the love of Pete, SMILE! Read the rest of this entry

From my experience using the Squidoo web site as a money-making online tool isn’t the best use of your time. Instead, setting up a blog of your own, with Google’s Adsense, that you host is a much better idea. But, Squidoo is easy to set up and kind of fun. It offers a community feel to it and you can rank rather quickly with it for less competitive terms in the search engines.

I have two lenses, what Squidoo calls your page, and they were a blast to create and I do add to them occasionally. The real fun for me is trying to rank my lens in the top 100. I have reached 128 but that is my personal best so far. There are over 200,000 lenses at this time. It is also personally rewarding when someone ranks or votes for you lens which you can do by visiting my Smoothie Lens and my Jean Grey-Phoenix Lens.

But I just don’t see any decent money coming from this, but my smoothie recipe blog brings in over $350 $650 per month, with little to no effort through Google Adwords. I’ll update this if I see any change or increase in my $0.00 earnings from either of my Squidoo lenses. The real use for Squidoo is using the lenses to direct traffic to your main site such as my smoothie lens to my smoothie recipe site and providing quality one-way links that the search engines will follow and reward you with higher listings in the search results.

From the Squidoo About Page:

Squidoo’s goal as a platform is to bring the power of recommendation to search. Squidoo’s goal as a co-op is to pay as much money as we can to our lensmasters and to charity. And Squidoo’s goal as a community is to have fun along the way, and meet new ideas and the people behind them.

Read more about Squidoo at The SquidLens.

I hope this helps in your decision of creating a lens and what to do with it.

I have included a YouTube video on Making Money with Squidoo.

Update 10/12/07: Well, my 2nd full month netted $11.40. I did manage to make the Jean Grey lens the #4 ranked lens overall so even having a highly ranked lens in the Squidoo ranking system won’t help, you’ll need lots of visitors to help with that.

Update 11/14/07:  I earned $98.58 this month. I worked to keep it going pretty well this month.

Update 12/15/07: Earnings dipped to $48.06 for Squidoo, but I didn’t spend any time on it. So literally, money for nothing.

Update 1/12/09: I didn’t even look at the lenses hardly and my earnings went to $24.32, but I also noticed traffic dropped from Google. I do believe they are penalizing all Squidoo lenses now. We’ll see.

Stop Cell Phone Spam

For about a month I was getting 3-5 calls a day to my cell phone from these “make money online” companies.  I have no idea how I got on their list, but I knew I was getting a little perturbed by their insistent calling.  I mean, these were calls to my cell phone.  I always thought that was off limits for telemarketers, but my phone was getting more calls from numbers I didn’t know than from numbers I did.

Spam Cell Phone Calls Are Annoying

But those were not the phone calls that really got my upset.  Once or twice a day I was getting calls from the same phone number and it was nothing but silence when I picked up.  Sometimes I would let the voicemail take the message, but the voicemail messages were only 2 seconds long and the caller would hang up.  After looking up these numbers online, I found out that many other people were getting the same types of calls from that same number.

All I wanted to do was block them, so I would not be bothered any more by these annoying phone calls at all hours of the day.  But how do you block a number from calling your cell phone?  There was nothing within the phone itself that allowed me to do this and after talking to my cell phone carrier I found out that they could not do anything about it either.

Use the FCC to Stop Spam Calls to Cell Phone

What I found out was that I needed the FCC to make sure these calls stopped once and for all.  The Telephone Consumer Protection Act protects even cell phone users from unwanted calls.  There is a do-not-call list you can get put on, but if you are already getting the calls you can also report that number to the FCC, and they take these infractions very seriously.

If you would like to file a complaint you can do so at this website address for the FCC: http://esupport.fcc.gov/complaints.htm.   You should write down the exact number that has been calling you and what time these calls were made.  There is a short form you need to fill out online and it will only take 5 minutes to file your complaint.  They just want to make sure they are getting the right information and your annoying phone calls should stop.

Since filing a complaint I have not received any more of these spammy phone calls wanting me to spend a bunch of money on a “make money online” course, but if I ever do get another phone call I will note the number and file another complaint.  This is the simplest and most effective way to block spam calls from coming in.  And if you are already paying for every minute on your cell phone, the last thing you need is to get a commercial every time you pick up the phone.

You can get more tips on protecting your privacy at www.SafeIdentityProtection.com , where Jon writes about ID theft protection.  There are also Trusted ID reviews and comparisons of different identity theft protection companies.

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As a bright young graduate of college, I was overwhelmed by the number of seemingly lucrative offers being hurled at me before graduating. Company cars, company-paid business trips, expense accounts, gourmet-catered luncheons and client dinners were all a part of the job. It seemed that software engineering positions and technical sales engineering positions were plentiful with the number of them that I was offered. Each offer was accompanied with more perks and a higher salary.

I accepted a position as a technical sales engineer. This position had the second highest salary and the most perks of all the technical sales engineering and software engineering jobs I was offered. With all of the perks and moving expenses, I was earning $70,000 or more as my base salary. I also had the potential to earn annual bonuses, as high as $15,000 or more, with sales commissions. Seventy thousand or more was a substantial salary for an entry level position, even today. I thought getting a job was easy. Read the rest of this entry