Give your laptop a custom look with Schtickers

Establish Retrofitted Designs as a sustainable high-design decor and organization products manufacturer that balances its commitment to profitable growth and community focus.

What a cool and innovative idea. Seems like more and more companies are offering means to make your electronic devices a bit more personal (check out ColorwarePc.com). Schtickers goes beyond the custom look by allowing a bit more 'feel' to your laptop with suede products available.

I would use a black one with my tribal logo on it .

Link:
http://www.schtickers.com/

Google Adsense ads offers ad scrolling

Seems like Adsense ads offer a new feature where you can scroll through ads in an ad block using provided arrows. This is something I have not heard about before and just noticed in one of my ads.

Basically, when you click one of the arrows the ads scroll away and new set of ads scroll in. Cool feature but not sure how many people will actually use it.

New Adsense for YouTube videos

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

Just testing this out

9 1/2 Ways - To Get Customers to Open Your Direct Mail

A recent study by the Direct Marketing Association found that nearly 70% of consumers prefer to receive announcements and information on new products from companies they are familiar with via conventional mail, versus less than 20% who prefer e-mail pitches. But with so many companies sending out direct mail, even a carefully culled and targeted mailing list is often not enough. Here are some ways to ensure that your direct mail gets opened:

Interesting. Especially the item about using blue ink.

Link:
http://.../9andhalf_ward_mail.html

Web Marketing: Standard Ad sizes

Couple of good sources for what the standard sizes are for web marketing material (images, movies, Flash).

On Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_banner

Interactive Marketing Units:
http://www.fearnwebdesign.com/php/pages/advertising.php

Veign goes tribal

I have designed two new shirt designs for CafePress for Veign. I wanted a design that used some tribal designs to make it look a bit more interesting. Note: Even though the shirt previews aren't high quality looking the shirts and the images will be.

What do you think?

Link:
http://www.cafepress.com/veign

Custom embroidered and printed shirts

Create custom printed or embroidered shirts through Blue Cottons online design studio. Very easy to do and probably expensive, not sure as I didn't go through the entire process. If you want stuff thats affortable and also very ease to use check out CafePress. I have had a CafePress store for Veign for a long time and use it to buy shirts and stuff to give out to clients or anyone else wanting to wear a shirt with Veign on it.

Link:
http://www.bluecotton.com/

Dell Computer Ad from 1992

PR Leap

PR Leap is an online press release service that offers both free and paid distribution to search engines, newswires and websites since 2003.

That means you can use PR Leap to get word of mouth rolling, quickly and inexpensively for yourself, your business, or your product. Everything on PR Leap is submitted by the PR Leap user community. All newsworthy press releases are welcomed.

Even includes a FREE account. Worth checking out.

Link:
http://www.prleap.com

Most entertaining IT ads from four decades of Computerworld

Here's a few of the copy from the ads:

"You say you don't know your process from your loop? Or your CASE from your GOTO? No doubt, you're suffering from COBOLitis,"
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These modems are "all performers," this ad not-so-subtly boasts -- from 1,200 bit/sec. all the way up to 4,800 bit/sec.
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"MultiSpeed is multi-talented. It's small. Light. And gives you the option of running at a clock speed of either 9.54 or 4.77 MHz," boasts this ad from NEC showing what a laptop of its day was like. It weighed in at 11.2 lb. with 640K of memory, dual 720K drives and five built-in programs.

See all:
http://www.computerworld.com/...

Is your Web site 'usable'?

You try one company's Web site. It's plain, but it lists pricing information, the models it services, and its contact information. Then you try another company's site. It makes you sit through a three-minute Flash presentation before letting you explore the site. (There's a "skip this intro" button at the top right, but the button is camouflaged.) And, instead of getting pricing information, you have to fill out a form and wait for a salesperson to call.

With probably millions of websites competing for the same thing your website has to be as easy as possible on the user. Make it confusing, too difficult or too many clicks to get around and your users will move on.

Link:
http://.../online_marketing/is_your_web_site_usable.mspx

Better Google Analytics through URL tagging

Google Analytics is probably one of the best free web statistics applications around. This is one of those things that every webmaster (man I hate that word) should have installed in a website. With Google Analytics you get an in depth view of the traffic coming to your site and, with goal conversions, you can track whether they reached the page you wish they would. Powerful, easy to install and a great interface (as of the second release) makes this my favorite places to visit and poke around.

Not only can you track the traffic as they move around your site but you can track how they get to your website. This is especially important if you want to setup and run an email campaign or you're running ads on another website. No need to write code or do anything fancy, all you need to do is use URL Tagging.

URL Tagging is what it sounds like, a method of tagging a URL to provide better stats through Google Analytics. You can have a group created for an email newsletter or a banner ad running on another website. Google has made it so easy to create tags, through their online URL Builder tool, that you can start tagging all your newsletters separately to see how each one performs. This is just the tip of iceberg of the power of Google Analytics.

Go forth and start tagging!

What is tagging:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/...

Online URL Builder:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/...

Any reason to have an online business card?

Lyro seems to think so as they have developed an entire website around the concept of online business cards.

Their statement:

Today the web is a tangled mess. People can't find you. With lyro, you can take your business card out-of-pocket and sell yourself to a broader marketplace. Customers, colleagues and contacts can find and connect with you instantly. Lyro allows you to control your personal online brand...

I just don't think so. You are so better off spending the $9 a year for a domain and putting up a simple website. The only brand that is being built by Lyro is Lyro. Sure you get a business card, but so what? Do you really think someone is going to call you because they found you at Lyro?. I highly doubt it. They will go to Google and locate a really company who has a firm web presence that already contains the contact information they need.

If Lyro wants to make this useful then they should consider either: 1) allowing the business cards to be placed, via a piece of JavaScript code, on the persons existing website or 2) Giving people a small one page listing where the business card is a business card built for the web (copying a paper business card just doesn't cut it).

Veign on Lyro:
http://veign.lyro.com/