Business cards that end up in a stack of other business cards each with a different name and number yet little evidence as to why I actually kept that card or why I would want to get in touch with said name and number.

So we’re trying something new!

Business cards with a wonderfully simple design, clear call-to-action, no predefined layout and simple enough to be used without a design program.

Plenty of room for only what is needed and a clear marketing message.

So without further delay, here they are:

Free Marketing Optimized Business Card Templates

and the instructions on how to use them:

How to Use the Business Card Templates

We welcome your feedback on the design, layout and anything you would like to see (or not see).

The grand opening is set for March 22nd!

If you’re a brick & mortar business, that argument might seem counter-intuitive.  After all, you run one ad and can reach thousands or millions, right?  You might be broadcasting to thousands or millions, but I can guarantee you’re not reaching them.  Advertisers love to use metrics like the size of their audience to entice you into thinking you are actually connecting with those prospects.  We see this in broadcast media as well as other sources like newspapers and the Yellow Pages.  Recent headlines this past year about all the failing newspapers worldwide should cause you to re-consider that advertising model; clearly, many other small businesses and Fortune 500 companies before you have realized their marketing dollars are not being well spent in traditional media and have pulled out, leaving those newspapers filing bankruptcy.  Even at the local level, we have seen Yellow Page advertising reps dropping their rates to a fraction of previous years just to retain any kind of business from their clients who are leaving in droves.  It’s not just a tough economy that is driving those ad costs down; it is the vacancy of savvy business owners who have realized their advertising and marketing budget is better spent elsewhere.

Is this merely a shift in ad revenues, or part of something bigger and much more fundamental?  Consider the process of a Google search (or Yahoo, Bing or your favorite search engine) for a moment.  What is taking place there is an inbound process.  A potential client needs information, searches for it, and then clicks on the website to deliver on that.  They’re not responding to anything but their own drive and self-perceived need.  They are driving the request for contact.  That’s fundamentally different from an ad on a radio or television that’s causing someone to pick up the phone or visit a showroom.

Advertising by definition is an outbound process, a process which has become so crowded and noisy that rarely are those ads being heard.  It’s a process that’s fundamentally flawed; the only way you know if your ad is successful is if you sell more widgets.  You will go through a fiscal quarter of ad spend before you know if your ad is working.  Does that make sense on any level?  Especially in today’s marketplace, where marketing campaigns can spread virally to millions practically overnight, you can’t afford to wait three months (or more) to find out if you’re connecting with your audience.  Advertising starts with a product and then tries to find the buyer, when really your process needs to be finding the hungry audience and crafting your product or service per their needs.

New Marketing (as I like to call it) is fundamentally an inbound process.  You contemplate your customer.  You create products or services that meet their needs and you create an opportunity for them to find those products when they perceive the need.  Part of your success will be in crafting the product or service, and partly in your ability to control the perception of “need.”  Perceived need in the traditional advertising model occurred by bombarding the prospect with repeated messages until they perceived a need for the product; now that those messages are being ignored, your messages need to become more interactive.  Your product or service must adapt as you receive feedback from your customers and prospects.

For a web design to be effective, you must have SEO.  A thumbnail explanation of SEO is that the site speaks to the search engines in their language.  It is optimized for the search engines.  Why is that so crucial?  Because the number of pages on the Internet is increasing at an exponential rate, and the competition for page 1 in Google, Yahoo or Bing will grow in intensity.  It will be more & more difficult to rank on page one.  In the more competitive niches, it is already impossible to rank on page one without good SEO; that will become the case for every niche in the very near future.

Good SEO can mean many different things; in terms of SEO web design, “good SEO” means on-page factors.  Yes, you will also need to market your site to insure top placement in the search engines; on-age SEO factors are not enough in most cases (unless you are in an extremely tiny, non-competitive niche or hyper-niche) to insure top placement in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

The two go hand in hand.

The old school way of doing things was to create a website and then go hire a separate SEO expert to optimize it, oftentimes completely changing what the designer did because it was actually harmful for your search engine rankings.

Before you hire a web designer find out what their experience is with SEO and make sure that they can build SEO into the design of the site.