Printer@Work

Minuteman Press

August 19, 2008

An adroit mixture of everyday settings and extraordinary events.
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A compendium of strange-but-true recent events as reported in the legitimate press.
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The world of business and finance gets skewered, as Bottom Liners tackles subjects such as foreign takeovers, office policies, getting a raise, and the fast-paced world of Wall Street.
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A wry look at the absurdities of every day life.
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With a daily readership of more than 95 million, Dear Abby is the symbol of a caring heart for millions of people around the world.
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In today's complex world of family issues, learn from Dr. Dobson’s lifetime of practical experience in dealing with family problems.
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News From
Gary Keys

Idea of
the Week

Uncommon Product
of the Week

Spice up your designs with colors that do the talking for you.		Will they deliver pizza from 4 states away?
Big help. Little bookmark.		A Simple Way to Declutter Your Office

A Message From Gary Keys

The Way I See It

From Experience to Opportunity

Aldous Huxley once wrote, “Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.” Huxley’s own experience included a battle with illness at 16, which left him nearly blind for the next two years. Despite his diminished eyesight, his vision for the future remained strong. Huxley continued his studies and learned Braille. His condition kept him out of the service during World War I and changed his outlook on life. Once considering a career in science, Huxley decided instead to pursue writing.

Here's the way I see it: Like Aldous Huxley, we all face challenges in life. What we do with those challenges determines not only the outcome for the situation itself but also our outlook on life in general. At our printing firm, we look at challenges as opportunities. Each challenge provides a chance to improve our skills, hone our craft, and make a great impression. So the next time you find yourself facing a tough printing challenge, give us a call. We want to help you succeed.

Gary Keys

Idea of the Week

Color Talks… Are You Listening?

Next time you want to make a bold statement, try saying it with color!

Depending on what type of message or meaning you wish to convey, the color combinations you choose can support, emphasize, or contradict your message. Color stimulates the senses, symbolizes abstract concepts and thoughts, expresses fantasy or wish fulfillment, and produces an aesthetic or emotional response.

According to the Institute for Color Research, humans make a subconscious judgment about a person, environment, or item within 90 seconds of initial viewing, and the majority of that assessment is based on color alone.

Because color delivers an instant impression that is generally understood universally, color is very important in conveying a mood or idea where verbiage is not used or understood.

The power of color combinations can also be seen on many levels of marketing communication, including corporate identification and logos, signage, television ads, billboards, print media and packaging, online web sites, and on point-of-purchase displays.

Here is a small sampling of dominant colors and the responses they elicit:

Red: Exciting, energizing, sexy, hot, dynamic, stimulating, provocative, aggressive, powerful
Bright Pink: Happy, attention-getting, youthful, spirited, fun, wild
Light Pink: Romantic, soft, sweet, tender, cute, babies
Orange: Fun, childlike, harvest, juicy, friendly, loud
Beige: Classic, sandy, earthy, natural, soft
Brown: Wholesome, warm, woodsy, rustic, durable, masculine
Purple: Royalty, powerful, expensive
Light Blue: Calm, quiet, peaceful, cool, water, clean
Bright Blue: Electric, vibrant, stirring, dramatic
Bright Yellow: Enlightening, sunshine, cheerful, friendly, energy, happy
Black: Powerful, elegant, mysterious, bold, classic, magical, nighttime
Silver: Classic, cool, money, valuable, futuristic
Gold: Warm, opulent, expensive, radiant, valuable, prestigious

See more great ideas like this!
Click here to visit the Minuteman Press Ideas Collection.

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Marketing Tips

Beyond the Search Engine

If you're doing everything you can to make sure that your business's web page shows up on as many internet search results as possible, you aren't alone! But before you get too deep into the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) world, you might want to review your marketing strategy.

Local Or Global?
Even in the age of the internet, a vast number of businesses still conduct most or all of their business locally. When developing an internet marketing strategy, think in terms of your relevance. Often, the more unique your product, the more you stand to gain from investing time and energy into Search Engine Optimization. If your business sells paperweights sculpted out of underwater lava rock, you may very well increase your sales if you make sure that people throughout the World Wide Web are able to find your web site. By contrast, if your business specializes in selling masking tape, then most national and international visitors to your web page will usually prefer to go to a local vendor, saving time and shipping costs. General search engines are too big for what a local business needs.

SEO For Localized Businesses
Of course, people will still be looking for your business on-line. But people looking for local businesses often get better results from map searches. Map searches like Google Maps and MapQuest give users the ability to find businesses in their local region that have just what they need. So, rather than searching for "pizza" in a search engine and getting 218 million irrelevant responses, users can go to a map search and find every nearby pizza vendor -- exactly what they were looking for! In fact, you may already be on the map -- according to Google, much of their information comes from publicly available sources such as Yellow Pages and web search results. If you aren't on the map, most map searches have instructions on their home page for adding your business to the list.

Don't let the internet disrupt your marketing focus: for the best return on your efforts, conduct your marketing where you conduct your business.

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Tech Tips

Power-Surfing With Bookmarklets

Perhaps this has happened to you; you're browsing the web and happen upon a fascinating page, only to realize you don't have enough time to read through it all. What do you do? Well, you could open your email program, copy and paste the link into a new message, and click send.

Or, you could just click the "ToRead" bookmarklet!

Bookmarklets are little shortcuts that you can add to your web browser's bookmarks (or favorites) to run specialized tasks. Instead of going to a web page, they look up a small piece of computer programming and run it in your browser. This adds customized functionality to your browser, making your internet browsing much more convenient. With bookmarklets, you can email links to interesting websites to yourself with a single click, click a button to send a web page to social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us or Reddit, or even generate secure passwords with one click.

There is practically no limit to what you can do with bookmarklets, and new ones are being developed all of the time. To learn more, visit the wikipedia article on bookmarklets, or visit the site of one of the first bookmarklet developers at Bookmarklets.com.

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Uncommon Product

Padded Office Forms

Effective organization is critical to running an efficient workspace. One way to help keep your office well organized is to have your important printed forms padded in groups of 50 or 100 forms. Padded forms require less space for storage. They remain better organized than non-padded forms and don't get mixed up as easily.

With padded forms, it's easier to keep track of inventory. Because each pad contains an equal number of forms, you know that when you reach the last couple of pads, it's time to reorder. What's more, the padding helps to keep the paper flat and crisp, extending its shelf life and usability.

Padding is one of the many bindery and finishing services we provide. It's simple, attractive, and cost-effective. So the next time you need office forms printed, remember to ask about padding. It's a simple step that can make a world of difference to your efficiency and bottom line.

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