I was just working on an advert which I'm placing in a magazine in March. I've had mixed success with print advertising before but thought I'd give this one a go since I got the ad space pretty cheap.

The ad is only small - about 4cm by 6cm - and I wanted to print it and see how it looked on the page. So I press the print button and wait for it come out, not realising that I thrown an envelope into the paper tray when I opened the post this morning. So the printer pulled the envelope and printed my little ad on the back by mistake. It was a completely random act but I have to say, it looks brilliant.

It came out just the right size and this immediately seems like a perfect way to get little adverts for websites out there in circulation. There's no real cost attached and not much effort - just print a little text ad on a bundle of envelopes and use them as and when required.



I don't have to send too many letters by post but I'll certainly be looking ways I can add value to my envelopes in future!

Labels: ideas, marketing

I blogged over the last couple of days about how I had grabbed top position for a great search term on one of my websites.

There's some immediate, obvious advantages to this such as more traffic. But another benefit which is now becoming clear is that it opens doors for you in other ways.

For a while now I had been wanting to start reviewing gadgets related to the subject matter of this specific site and emailed a couple of companies asking for evaluation kit but the reaction was lukewarm generally. With my current ranking, I felt much more confident about approaching the PR firm of another manufacturer yesterday and telling them I have the top ranked site on Google (for the moment!) for a related term and can they send me stuff to review.

Bright and early this morning, the postman brought me a parcel from the PR company with the requested kit inside.

Now, it might be that this particularly company would have sent me the item to review before, but I can't help but think that the position my site is at in Google demonstrated that mine was a site worth doing business with and worth sending review to, which in turn let me create more original content and therefore continue to improve the site and make it the genuinely useful site I hanker after.

Labels: marketing, reviews, search engines, web promotion