Business has been crazy all week and now you have half a dozen bills that need to be in the mail by the end of the day.  As a small business owner, your time is precious.  You can’t afford to go through and write your return address of all those envelopes.  Return address labels or stamps are a must-have for all business owners.

Designing custom labels or stamps is easy.  Simply upload your own design or browse through online galleries.  Return address labels and stamps will save you loads of time, and allow you to focus your energy on the important things, like promoting your business and catering to your customers.  Return address labels and stamps also convey a more professional image to your clients and investors.   

Try matching your return address labels or stamps to your business cards too!

You’ve decided to make your own website. You don’t need a shopping cart or fancy animated graphics. A simple, professional site that looks great and tells people all about your business is all you require. However, you do have quite a bit of information to get across, so you plan to use the professional hosting package that VistaPrint offers. If setting up the site is anything like other things you’ve ordered from VistaPrint, it should be fairly simple, so you’re just going to jump right in.

Before you get very far, you may want to take a moment to think about exactly what you want to cover. While it is true that setting up your site is easy, you still need to have an idea of what you want where when you are putting together a big site with a lot of content, or you will end up with an unorganized jumble of pages.

• Create a content web on a piece of paper first. You home page is in the center and the main category pages are the spokes that come directly from it. From here, each spoke may have several spokes for more detailed content coming from them or they may not need any additional pages of content.
• Once you know your basic categories and your subcategories, you can begin building your site. When you follow your written web, your site will be well organized and easy for web surfers to navigate.

Everyone likes an extra pen, and these can be one of the best giveaway items out there. Vistaprint.com offers four-color, 360 degree printing, so you can be sure to get the information you want on the pen the way you want it. Vistaprint pens also feature a comfort grip, which makes them a nicer option than a plain one. You can even get your logo included in the design.

Magnets are another great option. People use these items all the time for everything from hanging a grocery list on the refrigerator to organizing office memos at work. Magnets are an inexpensive choice that can really be a great marketing piece either by themselves, or in combination with other giveaway items. They come in a variety of different sizes and formats as well.

Note pads also make a great a marketing piece. Again, they are useful, and people really appreciate getting things like this for free. If you want to, you can even pass them out with your pens for a more complete marketing package. You can also send them out in the mail with a coupon or brochure.

Another way to use these items is to outfit your employees with them. For example, if you have a storefront, pass out company pens for those who work at the counter. If you send people out to do estimates, arm them with a company pen and note pad. This type of detail can add a professional touch to your image as a business.

If you can find just a little bit of money in your advertising budget for items like these, you can expand your reach as a company. Giveaway  items, especially fun ones like pens, magnets and note pads, can be a terrific way to raise your profile as a business. The best part is that they don’t expire, so you can continue to pass them out for as long as they last.

Offer Gift Certificates or Gift Cards

Use flyers or sandwich signs to advertise that you offer gift certificates or gift cards for Mother’s Day or other occasions. The text could read something like, “Your Mother’s Day Shopping Ends Here Because Paris Nail Salon Now Has Mother’s Day Gift Cards.” Determine whether a related newspaper or radio ad could help drive customers to your salon. Circulate your flyers around the community as well.

Try a Publicity Stunt

Publicity is a great way to get attention for your salon and it can be very low cost. Simply support a charity event. Another idea is to have a contest that could be newsworthy enough for the press to publish your press release. Instead of a contest, you could get publicity by having a promotion such as the first 50 people to line up in front of your tanning salon dressed in grass skirts get 50% off a tanning session plus a basket of free products.

You could even find your salon mentioned in the local news. If you try something like this, make sure to give clear instructions about what customers should do and have an appealing stunt and prizes they’ll want to line up to get. The call to action is always important in any type of marketing situation and creating a big scene only works when you tell people what they should do.

Offer Discount Coupons for Your Low Traffic Days

Get coupons created to help you bring in more traffic to your salon on your slow days. For example, a nail salon could have “Manicure Mondays” and offer discount manicures that day. “Get a Tan Tuesdays” could work for a tanning salon. The coupons could appear on the bottoms of colorful promotional flyers that you have distributed around the neighborhood and/or inserted in local newspapers.