For some odd reason, I have a strange obsession with promotional products. I just love them. And not only just for me – or my sites – or my business. I like picking up pens, magnets and whatever from the pharmacy, the doctor’s office, etc. Or even better yet, at industry conferences. You can get some really cool stuff there!

I used to go to a lot of PTA functions and even went to a 3-day seminar for PTA once and we would get all kinds of cool stuff. And being the president of the PTA, I got all kinds of catalogs from promotional materials companies. I used to love looking through those! (Maybe I’m in the wrong line of work….? ha!)

Now instead of catalogs, I just look online – and I can spend eons of time on sites that sell promo stuff. Today I’m looking at Amsterdam printing and I could really, really get lost on that site! They have just about every promo item under the sun!

I really haven’t had a whole lot of my own promo items. I am drinking my coffee out of my Hippie Spelunker cup and I do absolutely love it! But – there is only one of them and it was really from CafePress, which isn’t totally promo stuff. I mean, you can do promo things there for your business, but, you can also just do fun, whatever stuff. Like maybe you want to make all kinds of elephant picture t-shirts and sell them. I meant to start a My Very Own Mail section in my seller account there, so people could buy ‘Bookworm Gear’, but, I just haven’t done it yet.

And one time I bought My Very Own Mail pens. They were so darn cute! And they went really fast, too! I would love to have some more, definitely!

At the Amsterdam site, you can get pens with any engraving you want on them. And they have seventy gabillion pens from which to pick! There are some really cool ones in there, too.

They also have personalized pencils there. Oddly, I had never even thought of that. Though, for My Very Own Mail, that would actually rock! I could hand them out to school kids, you know? That’s a really good idea! I’m glad I saw that section on there. I’m going to definitely keep that in mind.

I would really like to get some Hippie Spelunker stuff, too, though. I kind of see Hippie Spelunker as my ‘home’ online, even though My Very Own Mail came first. I guess I could get Hippie Spelunker pens and My Very Own Mail pencils. That would be cool.

Do you have promo materials for your sites/businesses?

Have a super groovylicious day!
Lisa Marie Mary

I’ve been working on getting my husband some business from the internet. He’s not entirely convinced that it’s actually going to work. He is a contractor – mostly residential remodeling. And he just doesn’t see the value in marketing a local-only business online.

I’m working on it slowly, bit by bit. I had gotten a pretty good start on it – I started a website for him, and then I registered him at Merchant Circle. And then I started him a few Squidoo lenses. And then I left it all sitting there. I completely lost all my steam for it.

Recently, however, I received a message from someone on Squidoo about his lenses. The message was from a realtor and he has a group on Squidoo that he was inviting us to join. And ever since then, marketing my husband’s remodeling services has been back on my mind again.

I want so much to prove to him that it would be beneficial for him to establish an online presence, but, I get so distracted with all of my other sites and blogs.

We’ll see – I may just make it work and wind up teaching him a thing or two!

Have you ever wanted to learn all about stocks and investing? I have always been very curious about it and have always wanted to learn how it all works. Well, now I can do just that. And I can trade stocks from real companies with virtual money. And at the same time, I will be entering into a weekly $1000 contest! So I will be learning and also eligible to win $1000! That’s awesome!

You just go to WallSt.net and sign up for the rookie challenge, and everyone who registers receives a free WallSt.net hat. It’s totally free to register and totally free to participate. I, personally, am looking at this as a chance to get a free education in the world of stocks. Yes, I know it won’t be a full-fledged education, but, it will definitely get me a lot closer to understanding all of it.

They rank the success of each user, tracking everyone’s performance, and comparing how you’ve done with all of the other Rookies. You will start out with $100,000 and you can invest it in any way that you wish.

The winners are determined by whomever has the highest percentage of gain in that week. You have to have $100,000 or more in total equity before you are eligible to win prizes. Oh, and every transaction you make costs a virtual $20.00.

I really like how much information is given on this site, I think they are really going to help a lot of people like me understand, at least a little bit, about investing. And the cool thing – it’s a social networking site – yes, Web 2.0 is reaching out into every walk of life. I love that. You have a profile, just like on many Web 2.0 sites, where you can add pictures of yourself, and tell people about yourself. You can make and add friends, and communicate with other users.

This could definitely be a very helpful site – to a lot of people! I know it will be helpful to me!

I’m so excited! I found a beautiful copy of my My Very Own Mail logo! Oh my gosh, isn’t it pretty?

My harddrive crashed in November, and I lost all kinds of stuff! And I lost my original images that the graphic artist had sent me, so I’d been using ones I was finding online in different places. And we all know how nice copies of copies look! Ugh!

Well, big ‘ol dummy me, I’ve been neglecting my first and ‘most precious to me’ website, My Very Own Mail, for quite some time now. I do still have a few sweet little customers, but, I have been far too busy blogging to update the website or market the business.

I keep noticing, though, that I am still getting a somewhat steady stream of traffic there, most especially on my Sample Letters pages. And horror of horrors! I don’t have any Google ads on those pages – my most-trafficked pages there!

And I keep meaning to get in there and clean things up, anyway, so I went in there this morning to spruce the place up a bit, and maybe place a few Google adsense units on some pages.

And that is when I found this beauty, hiding amongst the images in my site builder. Actually, no – it wasn’t in the images – it is its own page! Want to see: My Very Own Mail LOGO

That wasn’t even the final draft, as you can see the font is wrong – we switched it to Kristin ITC, which is what I use frequently on the site, and in the letters. I tried to do that – switch the fonts – in Paint – this morning, as you can see on the image at the top of this post. (I can feel you cringing, Loretta!) And that is why it surely doesn’t look like a job done by a graphic artist! Ah well….I tried!

I’m so freaking excited every time I look at it, though – I haven’t seen the image so crisp since…well…since Nodumbvember!

Back up! Back up! Back up! That shall be my new middle name!

It has been kind of interesting, though, finding/running into, pictures I’ve posted on the web in various spots and getting so excited and snagging them! For example, I used to be a pretty active member of Ryze, but, I grew bored of it. But something recently led me back there – and there were a couple of pics there. Little things like that keep happening, and I am snagging pictures right and left!

Again I say – BACK UP!!

So just who was that very talented graphic designer who created my logo? Well, that would be Jennifer Johnpoll, of azxure Dawn designs. She totally rocks! I absolutely love the graphics she created for me! (She is also one of the owners of Punkymoms – the coolest online community ever!)

And now I see that I really am a complete idiot! HA! She has the graphics – my graphics – right there in her Portfolio! I didn’t want to bug her about it, because I was a knucklehead who crashed my machine – and who knew if she even had them anymore! Somebody just smack me, okay? But you can see from her portfolio, that she does really great work!

“I can’t afford to outsource! I have so much to do and I am so overwhelmed and I just can’t seem to get it all done and there just aren’t enough hours in the day!”

All of the big name marketers, like Alice Seba, who I’ve looked up to for years, say you’ve got to outsource if you’re ever going to get anywhere with your own business. And for all this time, I’ve been thinking I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. I need it to move forward, but, I can’t afford it, so I can’t accomplish what I need to in order to move forward. Aggghhh!

NOT ANYMORE! …. Enter on to the scene, our entrepeneur’s hero of the year, DoMyStuff.com!! Now you can pick and choose the tasks that you want someone else to do, and negotiate a price – that you can afford – and get the help you need! Totally awesome!

(I am not sure why YouTube decided my video needed to be blurry, it wasn’t blurry on my computer. Hey, perhaps I need some help with videos… I gotta go, I’ll see you later! I’m going to DoMyStuff.com to look for someone who can help me with my videos!)
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Thank you, Liz Ryan! She just totally let me off the hook. Over the past year, I’ve heard a lot of talk about elevator speeches. I’ve even heard talk of quicker-than-elevator-speeches, who knows what they call those! And I’ve felt really pressured to come up with one. And when I was focusing solely on My Very Own Mail, I kind of had one down – sort of…

And it always felt funny to say. I only said it when the topic pretty much directly led there, because I just have not been ‘good’ at leading it there on my own, which, I find out today – is really a good thing. But let’s say I’m with two moms, a PTA meeting or something, and one of the moms knows me and brings up my business, at which point, I’m encouraged by that mom to tell the other mom about it. And it just always felt snarky. I worked on saying it with confidence, sounding proud of my sweet, little business, which I am. But it kind of never came out proud.

Well, a little bit ago, I was heading over to Yahoo to check my mail, and the words ‘Elevator Speech’ jump out at me from the front page. I am so glad I clicked over to it, because I feel so much better now. And a little stupid, too.

Here’s my favorite section from the article:

Reality Check

Maybe the elevator pitch makes you uncomfortable. Maybe it feels awkward and phony and presumptuous to spit your business credentials in someone’s face within a few moments of meeting them. If the elevator speech thing doesn’t feel like you, there’s a good reason why: Your mother raised you with better manners than that.

This elevator-speech business is atrocious. For at least 100,000 years, human beings have been carving out a system of social interaction that says, “Tell me something, ask me something, let’s get to know one another, and see what develops.” There’s a reason why audio business cards delivered 10 inches from your face have never taken off as a marketing tool before. They’re rude!

Boy, oh boy, does that ever let me off the hook! Whew! I feel so much better. But I also feel a little stupid because I know exactly what she is saying, but, yet – I was still convinced that I needed to have an elevator speech! At one of my children’s schools, one of the dads there, every single time I would see him at the school and talk to him, even just a quick hello – he wanted to tell me something about his business! He was in realty, and one day he was even up there handing out his promo calendars to all the moms waiting to pick up their kids! Ugh! He was such a pain in the neck!

When I think about him and the way he made me feel exactly like Liz Ryan puts it in her great article:

Inflicting your well-rehearsed elevator speech on a new acquaintance is exactly the same as saying, “I’m not sure how long I’ll be talking to you. And it’s vitally important that, above all, you leave this event knowing what I do for a living and how you can help me. So I’m putting it out there now, before we discuss one other thing.” What kind of statement is that? It says, “All you are to me is a source for contacts.” Yuck.

Brilliant, just brilliant! Thanks, Liz!

You can check out the full article here:
Lose the ‘Elevator Pitch’ by the Savvy Networker, Liz Ryan
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