I signed up for a StumbleUpon account, which I have been loving!  If you haven’t tried it yet, download the toolbar and Click “stumble”  I have discovered some great websites that I would have never come across otherwise.  One they showed me today was a comparison of fast food advertising vs. reality (click the link, it is really cool!).

Small businesses need to make sure their advertising compares with what they are providing too — especially service based businesses.  It is one thing to promise “great customer service” or “delivery in an hour,” but if you don’t provide what you promise, your advertising will be as transparent as fast food restaurants.

In addition to being a small business owner and operator, I am a mom.  Therefore I subscribe to several e-newsletters from baby and kids stores, some of which only sell toys made in the US or Europe (I love wooden toys).  For the life of me, I can’t figure out why I haven’t gotten one email marketing message from one of them saying “worried about lead in your kid’s toys?  All of our toys are made in Germany with Lead Free Paint.”

This could be a huge opportunity for them…parents are at a point where they are reconsidering the toys that they buy for their children and/or buying them new toys for the ones they are returning/throwing out.  Why not remind them that the toys they sell are safe.  Even if they don’t send out an email marketing correspondence, why not run a PPC campaign for the keywords like Mattel recall list — Lawyers are doing it or put something on their homepage that says “All of our toys are lead free.”

I don’t know what your business is, but take a look around to see what news stories could be affecting your business/industry even if they don’t mention your business specifically.

Testimonials can add a lot of creditability to your website that would otherwise blend in with the crowd.  For some tips on how to create great testimonials, head on over to Copyblogger for some hints.  Fore more information on this topic, our August issue of Internet Strategies will have a full article on creating testimonials that sell.

It has been awhile since I have last posted, but for a very good reason!! I just had a baby girl. She was born the exact same day as her brother – 4th of July – only 2 years later. Life is very busy but good! I love having two kids. I’ll be posting more frequently now that things have **kinda** settled down. I also just signed up for a LinkedIn profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/magro if you want to join my network and a flickr (mostly personal) profile.

We were trying out our new double stroller this weekend at the mall. It fit thought every door and every set of clothing racks at every store we went in except at the Baby Gap, which I found very funny. Shouldn’t that be the one store where we breezed through without a moment of difficultly? Then on Monday, I read Seth’s post about The Gap. Read his book, and you won’t have the same problems as the gap.

I had a large document that I didn’t want to print on our office computer so I decided to print it out somewhere else.  My first thought was Kinkos….but I noticed one major problem with their website….a complete lack of pricing information.  I don’t remember where I read it, because I am constantly reading usability information for the web, but I remember reading that most people that are visiting a website aren’t finding the information that they are looking for.   The main piece of information they are missing….pricing information.  I found it interesting that such a large site as Kinkos didn’t have pricing information on it.  The only way I finally found out how much they charge for black-and-white double sided copies was to sign-up for an account, upload my document, and then see what the total was.  It was $17.  That seemed a little expensive to me, but I remembered that I saw the UPS store offered printing services the last time I was in there, so I called them (pricing information also was not readily available on the site, but a very friendly person answered my question by phone in a few seconds….they were also much cheaper – only $12 for the same document.

In conclusion, neither Kinkos nor the UPS store have focused their website on what their customers want when it comes to price – but at least I found out that the UPS store is cheaper.
PS – It is been a while since my last post, but I am up and running again.  I am going to have another baby in July and I am just starting to get over the tiredness that accompanies pregnancy (even more so on the second one when trying to keep up with the first one).