CDG Marketing & Web Design

Promoting Your Business

Free Secret Way to Promote Your Business

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Got your attention, didn’t it? It’s not really a secret, it’s just that so many people simply skip it, or don’t use it well, that you’d think it was a secret.

Free and Easy Marketing that Everyone Can Use

Are you looking for a set-it-and-forget-it way to keep your company information in front of your contacts? One that’s FREE? Piece of cake!

Your email signature is the perfect opportunity to not only make sure your contacts have information about how to contact you, but it’s a quick way to share links to your web site, your social networking pages, and even a YouTube video channel. Don’t stop there, though… A one-liner about your business that get’s people interested (referred to as your “talking logo” by John Jantsch in Duct Tape Marketing) should also be there.

Every modern email program has some sort of a “signature” option available. Once you set it up, the signature is attached to every email you send out. Most programs even allow you to have multiple signatures. In the case of the Mail app on my Mac, I can have multiple signatures for each email account.

Email signatures should be either text or html. There should be no graphic attachments in your signature — your logo can, and should, be embedded as HTML. To do this, the logo or other graphics must be hosted on the internet somewhere. The “somewhere” can either be on your own hosting account, Flickr, Picasso, Photobucket, etc.

Here are some samples of email signatures that I use:

Valerie Cudnik
1508 Percheron Ct.
Chesapeake, VA 23322-1928
(757) 271-4602
cdgwebdesign.com

Website Design | Printing | Graphic Design

Connect with me online at:
friend me on facebook grab our RSS feed watch my youtube videos

A woman-owned small business (SWaM: 685565)

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail may contain confidential and/or privileged information and is intended to be read only by the person or authorized representative of the organization to whom it is addressed. Please do not print, copy, re-transmit, disseminate or otherwise use the information, all of which are prohibited. For your protection, we remind you that this is an unsecured email service, which is not intended for sending sensitive information.

These particular signatures serve various purposes. I’ve just updated it and the CDG (html) version with my social networking information. The logos and graphics help maintain my brand for my various ventures.

I’ve created a WordPress plugin exclusively for the use of my clients to create the html they need for their own email signatures.

Promoting Your Business Using Press Releases

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press-releasePress releases are a great way to get media coverage of your business as well as links to your website. The trick is getting the press releases to the right people. There are several ways to go about this, some are free and some cost money.

For now, let’s consider the free options. There are many, many sources out there that will distribute your press release for free. I found a fairly comprehensive list of free press release sources in an article on Mashable.

Another source of contact information is to pay for access to a site such as Mondo Times. They maintain comprehensive lists of staff members, editors, etc., for most newspapers, magazines, tv stations, etc. Each record contains the name, phone number, fax number, email address, and street address. The basic membership gets you access to each individual record, but they can be painstakingly slow to build one record at a time. The costs for specialized purchased lists can add up quickly.

When choosing to promote your business with press releases, you may want to consider hiring a professional writer to help compose it. A professional can help maintain the focus of the information, as well as write in a professional format that media folks are used to reading. I work closely with a few professional writers, so please contact me if you need help with this part of your marketing campaign.