Online Brochure for an Offline Business Part 1

admin | Aug 19, 2009 | Comments 0

I was at a client’s business recently as they start to prepare for the start of their Fall Quarter. So the normal stuff ensues: budgets, projects, tradeshows, and of course…new catalogues.

Now like most offline businesses that I’ve seen, especially in the ‘Corporate‘ arena, they had a ‘few’ catalogues left over from the previous quarter…like enough paper to represent a small woodlot at a cost of an average salary. That, to me, is pretty scary. The fact that it’s so commonplace is even scarier.

This is one of the problems they brought me in to solve. See, in case you haven’t been paying attention, the old model of doing business (especially advertising via branding…which I’ll get into in a future post) isn’t working out so well. Part of the reason that smaller, ‘leaner’ companies can quickly outgrow and outperform their larger corporate competition is that they simply don’t have the money to make wasteful choices in the first place.

Another client of mine, when moving toward a ‘bigger business’ model retained a lesson he learned when he was a ’sole proprietor’. He designed his ‘brochures’ to fit nicely on the average 8.5 x 11 paper and simply kept the file on his computer. This allowed him to email a copy to prospective clients or print out a copy or two as necessary. It allowed him to make changes on the fly (ever miss a typo after a 10,000 copy run?) and avoid the inevitable loss of paper, ink and ultimately capitol required to have ‘stock‘. For direct mail he also makes use of an online service that prints postcard ads he can design online and then run a campaign with a lot less cost than the average envelope…not to mention that he never has to get involved in the process beyond creating the card and the PURL (This is the personal URL that his email company prints on each postcard to bring the customer to a specific page with the offer on it. This way he creates his ’sales letter’ online without the cost of printing and mailing it. Here’s the company: http://bit.ly/TPGUG). This is a cool way to create an ‘online brochure’ without even having a website.

Now if you’re looking to create a ‘brochure’ for yourself to show to the world the web provides you with more ways to do it than you can shake a stick at. My favorite way is WordPress. It’s the most popular ‘blog’ format on the web (Blog=Web log). I use it because it’s VERY easy to use, extremely powerful, and Google likes it…in fact if you found this site from a search engine I just proved my point It’s a step ahead of the ‘mini site’ or ‘landing page’ site that you can create with a good email provider as I mentioned before. But for today I just want you to think about what it is you actually want to say online and what you’d like people to see.