I’m just wrapping up my part in this year’s Buyer’s Guide (if you guys ever want you have a lot of fun, try proofreading a phonebook), and am just starting to get into the meat of our December issue, so this week I thought a nice, simple link roundup might be a good post for this week. Just a few quick blurbs of interest I guess:
1) Are you guys reading Mark Graham’s blog over at Rightsleeve.com? If you’re not, you should probably do something about that. I think Mark is one of the more clever and important industry voices you can find online, and his blog is usually pretty great about supplying a steady stream of wisdom. Some recent favorites of mine are this post about incorporating social media into promotional campaigns and this one about misconceptions about social media and sales. There are plenty of other great posts that aren’t about social media too, like this one about a brilliant gift bag and why it worked so well.
If you want more of Mark, you can read an interview I did with him on blogging and its importance to small business in the upcoming November issue of our sister magazine, Print Professional.
2) Not to beat the blogging horse, but I found another post I thought worth sharing on the blogging-advice site Problogger. Though it’s about professional blogging, the crux of the post is about ways to safely diversify your income stream between short-, medium- and long-term projects, which I feel is sound advice for any business. If you’re interesting in the justifications/further explanations of the idea, you can give the post a read right here. Also, blog blog blog blog blog.
3) No link here (sorry!), but I do want to talk about our Buyer’s Guide a little bit. Like I said above, we’re just wrapping up work on it today, and I think there are a few new features added this year that will make our most popular issue a little better. For the first time ever, we’d pulled the apparel categories out of the yellow pages and into their own section. This makes it much easier to browse for clothing, since you don’t have to sift through sections like “scales” and “scissors” if you’re looking for “scarves.” We’ve also added social networking information to suppliers who chose to have company profile pages created, making it that much easier for you to get in touch.
Until next week,
Mike
MIKE FACT OF THE WEEK: The worst part of proofreading a phonebook is proofreading a phonebook. Also, proofreading a phonebook.
