Okay, you’ve got it. You have the perfect message (and ravishing design to go along with it) and now you are charged with the task of figuring out which medium works best for your message/design. All mediums are not created equal for every message, idea or campaign.

Picking the right medium means you have to be smart. You certainly wouldn’t want your best marketing efforts to call out to a crowd that can’t hear you, do you?

Looking at your various options (and thoroughly examining them) will give you better insight into where you can put your message so that it gets you the most bang for your marketing buck.

Example: You have a creative series of images, all of which need to be seen to fully understand the concept, and you have enough text that you need at least 30 seconds for people to read your whole message. Putting this on a billboard probably won’t work out for you. People only have a few seconds to glance at your billboard ad, and they aren’t really able to piece together a stream of images and text in the short amount of time it takes them to drive by. However, a catchy idea like this would work great on a postcard. Let’s face it, most postcards don’t have the most attention-grabbing images. The ones that do tend to stand out. If your images are strong enough, and your message clear, putting your design on a postcard is likely to be your best bet. Plus you’ll have gotten their attention with your images, and your copy can pull them in and make them want to learn more about your products and services.

Another example … say you have a single captivating image and under ten words in your whole design. This will likely translate better onto a billboard than our last example. With billboards, you have to keep it short and sweet, while still being striking enough so that your audience takes notice. Postcards, brochures and flyers give you the option to add support text to more abstract images that need a bit of explanation, where you can’t do that with billboards. Make sure your message, design and ideas translate into mediums that can actually help your marketing efforts.

Creativity doesn’t have to get lost on mediums, like billboards, and it shouldn’t. You simply have to be careful to make sure you pick the right medium for each message you have.

So where in the world do you get started with accepting payments online?  What about PayPal, and what about other credit card services? What’s the difference?

There are many ways to equip your web site with “e-commerce”.  From sophisticated shopping carts to one-step order forms, thousands of businesses successfully make that step into the e-commerce world.

To put it very briefly and simply, here are a couple of things you should understand about the difference between basic PayPal accounts and true credit card merchant services:

• The cost of integrating a basic “standard” PayPal account is very low, because it is free to set up the PayPal.com account and the web developer usually only has to paste in and masssage a little bit of PayPal code into your web site.
• PayPal charges significantly high transaction fees/percentages for each transaction.
• When you use a basic PayPal set up, there is a period in the transaction process when the visitor leaves your own web site and goes to PayPal.com; the potential danger in this is that some buyers are scared off by the url/site change, and some businesses actually block their employees from visiting PayPal and similar sites.
• The cost to set up a merchant service account with an online payment gateway (like Authorize.net for example) may be higher (set up fees vary by industry, type of business, merchant service company).
• The cost from your web developer will likely be higher because they will need to either custom program an order form for your site, or they will need to install and customize a shopping cart software for your web site to accept the orders and communicate with the payment gateway.
• The rates/transaction fees will likely be much lower and more competitive with a merchant service company that is offering credit card processing for your business. This makes sense for businesses that expect to do a high volume of online credit card sales – overtime they will see significant savings.

To get a complete picture, I recommend talking to one or more merchant service providers to evaluate your options and get rates.  This may include having a conversation with your current trusted banking provider and also some recommended outside merchant service companies. Weight that information with your assessment of how many online sales you plan to have, and be sure to discuss your vision with your web site developer.

When you write copy for marketing materials, you need to make it work. You only have one shot to grab your customers’ attention and to make them read what you’ve written. Not only does your copy need to catchy and informative, it needs to be error-free and the best possible writing you can produce. If there is a typo in your copy, or an incomplete sentence, your readers are likely going to dismiss what you have to say. These errors, while some may be minor, can damage your reputation. You certainly don’t want to hurt your reputation at the same time you are trying to sell readers on your business. It’s not smart and will likely effect the results you get.

The moral of today’s quick tip is to make sure you proofread, and proofread, and proofread, and then read it again. Be error free this Wednesday and make a lasting impression.

Would you ever consider asking a friend to fly the airplane so you could get to your destination cheaper?  What about a part-time student pilot?

Unless you are a dare devil, I imagine you said no.

This is a point I like to make when I hear that someone has decided to “save money” but having their friend, or friend’s friend, or a part-time student – do their web site.  Sure, there is some new and upcoming talent out there, and there always will be people aspiring to be a web designer.  But what about your business?  How much does it mean to you?  Is your marketing worth so little to your business that you would risk it on an inexperienced, part-time, and possibly unreliable person?

I put “save money” in quotes because, unfortunately, there are many occassions when a business owner does go this route and finds out later that they lost money

- all that time that went by when the web site still wasn’t complete and no one could visit it…
- the poor results of a badly designed or badly coded web site, which actually scared away customers…
- a not-so-professional designer who stole copyrighted images and the owner later found themselves fined by the stock photo company…

The truth is, there is great value in hiring a professional web site designer/developer to create an attractive, functional web site, that actually markets you well on the Web.  The Internet is different than other marketing media, and your professional web developer will understand and strategize that for you.