Steve Jobs Dead at 56

One of America’s most iconic businessmen and innovative thinkers, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has died Wednesday, October 5, 2011.   After several years suffering pancreatic cancer and undergoing a liver transplant, I find myself sending my condolences to my idol of technology and following your dreams. “Because the people who are crazy enough to think …

View full post

Adobe Illustrator Live Trace Tutorial

Ready for some fun with Illustrator’s Live Trace feature?   So what I’ve done here is draw a picture on plain paper and then scan it to the computer. After inserting the scanned image into Illustrator, you can use the Live Trace feature to turn your sketch into a completely editable, colored vector image! Here’s …

View full post

Inmotion Hosting Hacked by TiGER-M@TE

END OF THE WORLD! Just kidding, but if you happened to visit the blog this Sunday, September 25, 2011, you may have noticed this as our homepage:   Very impressive TiGER-M@TE! Very convenient as well as I had to re-upload the entire website! One more thing though, STOP IT ALREADY! PEOPLE MAKE LIVINGS ONLINE! Now …

View full post

Crazy Advertising Stuff You Didn’t Know

Ready for some advertising goodies I bet you never knew?     If your child’s first words are “Coca-Cola”, don’t be surprised! The Coca-Cola logo is the most marketable brand worldwide. A better looking shopping cart reduces the risk of it being abandoned. The reason there’s always 3 different sizes of cereal that only have …

View full post

Design Business Logos for a Living

You’re probably a graphic designer that’s sick of not working as one if you’re reading this.     Get serious about yourself as a graphic designer and don’t take crap from ANYONE! Here’s a little thing about the graphic design job market that you may already know: There’s an expanding demand for modern, young graphic …

View full post
Steve Jobs Dead at 56 Adobe Illustrator Live Trace Tutorial Inmotion Hosting Hacked by TiGER-M@TE Crazy Advertising Stuff You Didn’t Know Design Business Logos for a Living

Sep
14

SEO Services: Fact or Crap?

Categories:

by

I got a call from an SEO Company about 5 minutes after I deleted an E-mail from them.

This is the last straw…

 

Board the SEO-a-coaster!

 

FACT: SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

CRAP: SEO Companies spam you repeatedly to use their services because they care so dearly about your search engine results.
Why? It’s a simple (sadly efficient) form of advertising that targets the naive customer.

FACT: SEO is something that naturally comes with good, relevant material on a website.
Why? SEO Service would be like somebody offering you a manager for your business, but he’s already the manager for 12 other businesses. It just doesn’t make sense, right? Good material and having a better business than your competitor is what gets you a better ranking… not making it seem that way.

CRAP: An SEO service means selling you 500+ back links to your website.
Why? This is what we call “irrelevant content” and it’s never any good. Going out on the web and getting your own back links is always great though because this allows you to see what content is being linked to your website.

FACT: Paying for 500+ back links will more than likely be considered fraud and have you kicked off all major search engines.
Why? Imagine this: You have your own brick and mortar building for your business and to get people coming in, you put up 500 cardboard customers inside. When the time comes that an actual customer comes strolling in, they’ll realize it’s all just a show.

CRAP: “We’ll guarantee that your website will be number one in all search results!”
Why? This is the funniest thing in the world. SEO companies can’t possibly make this claim or anything close to it. Think about it! They can’t possibly help everybody out with SEO, because everytime they help one website get better rankings, they then create competition for themselves. So when their next customer comes around, it becomes that much more difficult to get better rankings. That’s why these types of services are complete crap!

FACT: There are hundreds of free tutorials on how to increase your search engine results.

CRAP: SEO Services

There’s no doubt that there’s a few decent and successful SEO Services out there, but I’ll tell you what, it’s not the ones spamming your E-mail.

Cheers!
Aaron

Shmoggo

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

1 comment

Aug
20

Shmoggo Commercial - EVERYTHING AT Shmoggo

Categories:

by

Shmoggo

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Leave comment

Aug
12

Necessary Printing for Small Businesses

Categories:

by

Essential Stuff

Business Cards

Absolutely a must have! Business cards are portable advertisement that should always be in stock. Wherever you go, chances are conversation will come up about your business (which is when you throw down your card.) Now, a flimsy piece of paper is just not going to cut it for a business card. Either are those “$3.99 for 250″ business cards that end up wrinkling, bending and tearing apart as soon as they go into somebody’s pocket! (Not to mention their company logo slapped on the back of each card.)

Making them yourself is always an option as office supply retailers usually have those punch out cards and what not, but don’t rely on these as a permanent solution. You’ll end up depleting your printer’s ink or toner in a matter of days, the print quality will be rather mediocre (smearing, jagged edges, etc.) and the amount of time you spend on these projects will leave you disappointed.

Try not to waste time doing it yourself or blowing chump change and chump products. Get professional quality the first and every time with some legitimate business card printing.

Brochures/Flyers

Probably the second most important piece of print material would be a well designed brochure. If you have a front desk or office for your business place, it would be just foolish not to have literature for customers and clients to read while they wait. With a good design and solid writing, brochures can be the perfect accompaniment to your products and services

There’s a ton of ways you can design brochures (Adobe InDesign, Microsoft Publisher, draw it on a napkin, etc.) But getting them professionally design is always an excellent option as plenty of designers are willing to do it for just a couple hundred bucks through a simple Google search.

Signage (Banners, Building Signs, Car Wraps and Posters)

Now this stuff depends on what type of business you’re running and where you’re doing it, but overall any kind of signage is highly recommended (and essential.) These things have your logo at a gigantic scale that funnel your market straight into the palm of your hand. You may think that you would have to find a shop close to you that does this, but chances are that there’s no local banner printing shop down the street. Go online!

Designing these yourself might not be the best option unless you have some experience with large format print design. Because the resolution being dealt with must be impeccable, professional designing and publishing is a must.

The Useless Stuff?

Use your best judgement. A little common sense can go a far way with this type of stuff because of one, unfortunate truth: not everybody is educated on printing techniques, options and materials. So big box printing companies say things like FREE, 99% OFF and FREE SHIPPING ON ORDERS OVER $3,000! Along with the never ending prompts of “Oh, don’t forget your custom stamping machine!” or “For just $3.00 more, you can add a map on your business card!”.

So here’s the good truth: you can find your solution to most of your essential, legitimate printing needs online for much cheaper than a big box printing company or a local shop

Cheers!
Aaron

Shmoggo
Design&Print

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

1 comment

Aug
11

Free Business Cards are Jokes

Categories:

by

Oh my! Free business cards! I want ‘em!

Alright alright, hold your horses! There’s no such thing as free business cards. I don’t care if they say they’re free, I don’t care if they guarantee they’re free, and I don’t care if they really are free- they’re NOT free! Allow me to take you through a theoretical journey to support such a claim.

The Pop-Up

So naturally, us consumers would click on it because… hey, it’s free business cards, right? So let’s proceed!

Disappointment #1

 

Okay… so if you want to limit yourself to their preset templates, then you’re still getting free cards! Woohoo! But, if you want to put your own business logo or design on your business cards, we’re up to $19.99. So, let’s assume you’d probably want to put your logo on your business cards (I mean, it just makes a little sense to put your own logo on your own business cards). Let’s continue!

Disappointment #2

Okay, so you’re still good for 250 free business cards, but don’t be too upset when one of them disintegrates into thin air! You can usually upgrade to the 100 lb. Cardstock option, but that will bring your free business cards up to $27.98 (assuming you’ve uploaded your own logo).

Also, for those who aren’t too familiar with paper stock options, 100 lb. still isn’t very durable (comparable to an index card). What you’re probably looking for is a 13 pt. or a 14 pt. Cardstock which is rather comparable to the thickness of a credit card. Let’s carry on!

Disappointment #3

Now this one is controversial… On one end, making an account with a printing company can be very useful for reordering your things quickly, but for stuff like getting some free $27.98 business cards? Completely annoying. And when you make an account, make sure you don’t sign up for special VIP offers. Unless you want to delete 10 extra emails every day, go for it!

The Recommended Products

Oh. My. Goodness. If I want something else, I’LL GET IT MYSELF! Nobody needs to go through 20 pages of offers when all they want is some free business cards that are costing almost $30.00 dollars now! So after 15 minutes of neglecting every single offer, dare we continue?

The Shipping


Holy crap! 2 Weeks for shipping?! We’ll at least want 1 week shipping (it’s considered priority for no reason at all) because although getting it in 3 days would be awesome… it’s almost $22.00 dollars.

Let’s Review Our Order

250 Free Business Cards - $0.00
Your Logo - $19.99
Not Tissue Paper - $7.99
Priority 7 Day Shipping - $12.99
Total: $40.97

Now… you might be saying “Well, you selected options that cost more money.” This is true, but let’s try the bare minimum… just for the fun of it.

250 Free Business Cards - $0.00
No Logo - $0.00
Toilet Paper - $0.00
Half a Month Shipping - $7.99
No Land Tortoise - $0.00
The Printing Company’s Logo Watermarked on the Back - $0.00
Total: $7.99

Alright! The bare minimum of free business cards still costs about $8.00! You could just buy 12 rolls of 2-ply toilet paper for 8 bucks!

To Sum it Up

If you want some durable, great looking business cards with your complete design on it… don’t mess around with this free stuff, get some legitimate business card printing, your business deserves it. Otherwise, you’ll end up spending a ton of time and money customizing “free + $40.00″ business cards that will just end up disappointing you in the end.

Cheers!
Aaron

Shmoggo
Design&Print

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

4 comments

» Newer posts