About Me
- Amber
- The Apple State, United States
- Visit me at ambermcleod.com where I display my wares...
Monday, July 21, 2008
Low-Cost Marketing Secrets
8:45 PM | 
Posted by
Amber
"One of largest expenses of runningyour business is promotion and advertising, especially for a new or small business. Making your business known in a community at he lowest possible cost can be tricky and time consuming."
"However, there are many ways a business can do this. A pet breeder in a large city was struggling for several years-until he came up with a novel idea. He started giving away customized “birth certificates” for the pets he sold. Almost immediately, his sales rose more than 10 percent. Now you even see specialty stuffed animal stores offering “birth certificates” with the purchase of a lovable critter!"
"The owner of a new home cleaning service was trying to attract clients. She couldn’t afford much advertising, so she began offering “home cleaning seminars” to civic groups. After two months of seminars, she was swamped with inquiries and..... "[read more from Jennifer Edwards]
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Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Charging Hourly? Getting interrupted by kids? Yup...I know.
When I started doing web maintenance I charged by the hour. Quickly I realized that having three kids makes hourly charges impossible - for ME, not to mention that some jobs took me 5 minutes. So I now charge by the minute (with minimums...in case any of you were wondering).
At first I tried using a Wiki to keep track of minutes. No go.
Then I tried Project Pier. AWESOME program, I'll use it for big projects - not minute tracking.
I had to slowly extract myself from cyberland and head back to my roots. Pen and paper. Yeah, you heard me right. Pen. Paper.
In the sixth grade I won the penmanship award. Here's some trivia...in what year did they stop giving penmanship awards? 1985.
Needless to say, my fingers are so accustomed to my precious QWERTY that a pen feels foreign and my writing is nothing short of pathetic. Sometimes I forget how to finish off a letter and so I just draw a line. That must be what doctor's do - only they do it out of sheer lack of time whereas I do it out of sheer lack of neurological function.
Again I digress. If you charge by the hour and you have kids bothering you every four to six minutes, make a time log. I have 7 columns on mine:
10:42 10:45
10:48: 10:57
...and so on. I always round up to the next minute on start times because that seems fair. Overall I do this because I'm fair, I couldn't stand it if someone thought I bilked them out of 14 cents.
ANYWAY, print a stack of these time log sheets on a clipboard. If you have several clients who you do small jobs for, give them their own sheet. I am NOT the queen of organization, I generally have tons of great ideas, very few do I implent. But this one? It has helped me immensely.
If you don't want to make your own, just download mine. You'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader, but seriously, who doesn't have that??
Here's the link: http://www.affordable-site-design.com/downloads/time-log-sheets.pdf
Do your worst!
At first I tried using a Wiki to keep track of minutes. No go.
Then I tried Project Pier. AWESOME program, I'll use it for big projects - not minute tracking.
I had to slowly extract myself from cyberland and head back to my roots. Pen and paper. Yeah, you heard me right. Pen. Paper.
In the sixth grade I won the penmanship award. Here's some trivia...in what year did they stop giving penmanship awards? 1985.
Needless to say, my fingers are so accustomed to my precious QWERTY that a pen feels foreign and my writing is nothing short of pathetic. Sometimes I forget how to finish off a letter and so I just draw a line. That must be what doctor's do - only they do it out of sheer lack of time whereas I do it out of sheer lack of neurological function.
Again I digress. If you charge by the hour and you have kids bothering you every four to six minutes, make a time log. I have 7 columns on mine:
- Date
- Client/Job
- Start Time
- End Time
- Charge
- Billed
- Paid
10:42 10:45
10:48: 10:57
...and so on. I always round up to the next minute on start times because that seems fair. Overall I do this because I'm fair, I couldn't stand it if someone thought I bilked them out of 14 cents.
ANYWAY, print a stack of these time log sheets on a clipboard. If you have several clients who you do small jobs for, give them their own sheet. I am NOT the queen of organization, I generally have tons of great ideas, very few do I implent. But this one? It has helped me immensely.
If you don't want to make your own, just download mine. You'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader, but seriously, who doesn't have that??
Here's the link: http://www.affordable-site-design.com/downloads/time-log-sheets.pdf
Do your worst!
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