Paper or Plastic

To quote a very wise reporter, “Press is what you want when you’re just starting out. Advertising is what you do to keep your name fresh in people’s heads.”

I’ve heard a lot of businesses say that advertising doesn’t work for them. But the truth is that they skipped over the first few levels. First you need to get your name out there. Not by purchasing ads, but by getting press, talking to people, telling people your story and partnering with other organizations.

Once you’ve established a presence in your community, then you can start advertising to spread the word to other people and to keep your business fresh in the minds of the people who already know about your business. For example, a new restaurant first wants to get press in as many papers, websites and magazines that they can. People will read an article by a reporter talking about how great a restaurant’s food is and then be more inclined to want to check it out. “Hey, let’s try that new place near Rittenhouse. Phila Weekly said they have great desserts.” Then, the restaurant might want to set up a table at the Spring Festival to give out samples and invite organizations to hold their event there. THEN, once a good amount of people have heard of the place or tried it out, they can continue to remind people they’re still open by advertising.

There’s just one catch, your business has to be good. Offer a bad product or lousy customer service and no one will be referring you or writing good stuff about your work.

Even if you’re not a professional designer, I’m sure there are occasionally times when you could use a program that’s a little bit better to design in than Microsoft Word. Quick flyers, personal invitations, thank you cards, whatever it might be, it might benefit you to download a program and learn the basics. There’s the basic text tool, arrows for moving things and the color box. When the time comes that everyone in the office is going crazy because they need to change a brochure at the last minute and the designer is not responding, you can save the day.

The recommended programs are expensive, but sometimes you can find deals for older versions. Or you can jump straight down to the free programs. They don’t have all the features the recommended programs have, but you can do basic designing and editing of images.

Recommended Programs:
• Adobe Photoshop – Photo Editing
• Adobe Illustrator – Illustration and Logo Design
• Adobe InDesign – Layout Design
• Adobe Dreamweaver – HTML Editing
• WordPress.org – Website Creation

Free Programs:
• GIMP – Photo Editing
• Inkscape – Illustration and Logo Design
• Scribus – Layout Design
• Text Wrangler (MAC only) or OpenOffice - HTML Editing
• WordPress.org – Website Creation
• Transmit – FTP

Tip:
• If you’re using an Adobe program, look to their website for free tutorials. For all other programs, look on the website your downloaded the software from for a Getting Started guide.