17 year old girl builds million-dollar web business

It's the kind of story that should give any aspiring web entrepreneur pause. How was a teenager able to build a website that attracts more than 7 million individuals and 60 million page views a month and what are the lessons for other site owners?

• Target a niche market and fulfill its needs.
  
• Give away something of value. Ashley Qualls created free MySpace layouts for friends and friends of friends.
  
• Monetize your traffic by running CPM ads by Casale Media, Value Click, Google Adsense, Nabbr, etc.

Read a case study about Ashley Qualls at doshdosh.

Branding Goes Postal

Justin Berton writes in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

Hewlett-Packard is about to become the first company to launch its own "personalized postage," meaning that the Palo Alto-based corporation soon will send first-class mail with postage bearing the familiar "hp" logo in place of a regular stamp.

Selling Art via Email & Blog

Our friend, designer Brenda Kett, turned us on to Julian Merrow-Smith's blog and daily art newsletter, "Postcard from Provence."



Thanks to some favorable press and word of mouth, Julian has developed a clever way to sell art directly to buyers without dealing with galleries or an agent. The paintings are small, but beautifully done, and sell almost as fast as he posts them.

The Word - Marketing

"It doesn't take a biblical scholar to see how Jesus is related to things like colored eggs."

If you missed The Colbert Report last night, you'll want to watch this.

Sony's Love Letter to San Francisco

A friend sent this with the message, "follow the link below for something wonderful."

Yes, "wonderful" is the right adjective to describe this ad for Sony BRAVIA. And if you didn't know what BRAVIA was before, you'll never forget after watching this. Such is the potential of good advertising -- leaving a lasting impression.

"San Francisco in Jell-O"

Elizabeth Hickok
San Francisco in Jell-O
The City - C-Print, 24"x36"


Be sure to check out her earthquake video, too.

"American Brandstand's Hit Parade"

From Business Week:

Lucian James, founder of brand consultancy Agenda, explains how his tracking of product mentions in hip hop lyrics can pay off for marketers

Launched two years ago by the boutique San Francisco-based brand consultancy Agenda Inc., American Brandstand is an ongoing effort to track the number of mentions of a brand in the lyrics of the Billboard Top 20 singles chart, and last year West emerged as the most name-dropping artist on the list.

While Agenda's principals have never presented their findings as rigorous science, they do see the numbers as a strong barometer of a brand's perceived value among trend-setting youth. "For a brand to be successful today, it can't be created back at headquarters," says Agenda founder Lucian James. "Brands have a life of their own in pop culture. Companies have to understand that and learn to incorporate it."

"Marketing Group takes the dead off lists"

The nation's largest direct marketing group set up a registry Thursday to remove dead people from its telemarketing, e-mail and direct mail lists - for $1.

The Direct Marketing Association, which has more than 5,200 members in the United States and 44 other countries, said its Deceased Do-Not-Contact list was designed to help families dealing with the loss of a loved one.

"The DMA recognizes how emotionally and logistically difficult the process of handling someone's final affairs can be," Pat Kachura, the group's senior vice president for ethics and consumer affairs, said in a statement.

The organization said the $1 fee was for credit card verification, and was designed to prevent fraud.

"We're concerned people will abuse the list, putting the names of friends on it, that kind of thing," Kachura said in a telephone interview. "So we're very concerned that those who are on the list are those who should be on the list."

"Your name here' goes global"

Customized T-shirts, posters and postage stamps have emerged as the Internet's latest darlings among venture capitalists.

To get started, users create their own designs for products including T- shirts, posters and greeting cards. The Web sites then handle the printing and shipping.

Many people simply use the Web sites to make gifts for family members and friends. Others earn royalties by selling their products or designs to shoppers on the sites.

"New Gas Bill Designed By Some Kind Of Freaking Maniac"

Ok, this is satire, but it makes a serious point. When we've designed forms for Intuit or Wells Fargo, we try to make them easy to read -- so customers can place their orders quickly, with minimal fuss -- and easy to follow, so they know exactly what they will will get and what they will be charged. We've never worked for the Keystone Gas Company.

Some kind of raving psychopath apparently gnawed through his restraints and burrowed out of the Massachusetts Center For The Criminally Insane to design the invoice for the Keystone Gas Company, 36-year-old Michael Beasley reported Monday.

10% of Small Business Marketing Plans Include Blogs

Anita Campbell writes on the Small Business Trends website that according to a recent HP survery, 10% of Small Business Marketing Plans Include Blogs. According to Anita:

Ten percent of small business owners in a recent study reported that they have included blogs in their marketing plans. And 16% plan to invest in blogs over the next 2 to 3 years.

This is from a study of small business owners that HP announced last week. The study was conducted by Harris Interactive in March of 2005, and was part of HP's activities during national Small Business Week. I was pleased to participate in discussions about the Harris/HP study results.

The HP study covered a wide variety of topics. It's an interesting study on a number of fronts, and I will be writing more about it.

But right now I want to focus on the information about small business blogs.

Of course, no actual count of business blogs today exists. But the number in the HP survey, suggesting how many business owners' marketing plans and future plans include blogs, is quite interesting, especially when you compare the numbers with those whose plans include websites. When you consider that not quite half of the small businesses surveyed even have websites, the fact that 10% are including plans for blogs is pretty remarkable.

I'm as surprised as Anita is that more than half of small businesses still don't have websites, but underwhelmed by the number who plan on including blogs in their marketing mix. It's one thing to "plan" a blog, but another thing altogether to create and maintain one.

You'll find the HP Survey here.

Architect as Critic

The design is not so much a rejection of traditional monumentality as a reinterpretation of it, and it celebrates the culture of the book as passionately, in its way, as does the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. The Seattle building is thrilling from top to bottom. Koolhaas and Ramus started out by investigating how libraries actually work, and how they are likely to change. They went with Deborah Jacobs, Seattle’s chief librarian, and several trustees and staff members to look at libraries around the country, and then they held a series of seminars about the future of the book with scholars and representatives of Microsoft, Amazon, M.I.T.’s Media Lab, and other organizations. They concluded, not surprisingly, that people are not ready to give up on books and that they are not ready to give up on libraries, but that they find most libraries stuffy, confusing, and uninviting. Patrons wanted a more user-friendly institution, and librarians wanted one that was more flexible, and would not require constant rearrangement as collections expanded.

The architects saw that in most older libraries, where books are stored on rows of shelves on separate floors, collections are arbitrarily broken apart, depending on the amount of space available on each floor. But since the Dewey Decimal System is a continuous series of numbers, they reasoned, why couldn’t books be stored on a continuous series of shelves? And what if the shelves wound up and up, in a spiral? They saw that it was possible to design stacks in the manner of a parking garage, with slanted floors joined in a series of zigzagging ramps. The stacks, which the architects named the Spiral, take up the equivalent of four floors in the middle of the eleven-story building. They are open, which means that you can browse. You get to the Spiral via a chartreuse-colored escalator and stairway that slices through the middle of the ramped floors. (All vertical circulation in the building, including the elevator cabs, is chartreuse.)

"Less taxing"

Karen Schriver’s redesign of the IRS 1040 form started out as a dare. Avrum D. Lank, a reporter from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, challenged her to redesign the document—retaining all the information and keeping it to two pages. With no budget and no contact with the IRS, she took it on, consulting occasionally with the journalist’s own tax lawyer.

Schriver is an expert in information design—a tight integration of textual and graphic design. It was not the first time she had tried to tame a tax form.

Schriver’s new design is more open, readable and friendly. The IRS was astonished by the result, double- and triple-checking to see if she had dropped any information. (She hadn’t.) Schriver’s changes have not yet been implemented, but officials say they are considering a redesign for the 2006 filing season.

"A wale of an idea -- turning corduroy sideways"

Simple ideas are best, especially when they're not obvious ...

Their irreverent, visually arresting Web site, www.cordarounds.com, is as sophisticated as it gets. But there's still a lot to be said for old-fashioned door-to-door service, so sometimes the duo hand-deliver the goods. One day they go to an espresso-machine shop on Pacific Avenue, the next, the 36th floor of a Financial District office. "I love it that my business is a combination of high- and low-tech,'' says Lindland, who has lived in San Francisco for eight years. "It's a great way to get to know the city.''

$25 Free Google Advertising Credit

Why register with Google Local? Why not?! It's free and is a great way to make sure that prospects and customers can find you.

And to make this sweet offer even sweeter, Google will send you a promotion code for $25 Free Google Advertising Credit once you register.

Get started by clicking here.

Designers Make T-Shirts Big Business

You've probably seen young kids wearing Neighborhoodies t-shirts in San Francisco, but perhaps didn't know that they come from a Brooklyn-based company. It's an interesting story of how a designer made something for himself, and it turned into a thriving, nationwide business.

The idea that t-shirts, or toys for that matter, can be big business hasn't been lost on San Francisco designers, either.

Edmundson, 36, and Long, 34, are two-thirds of the design team that, along with hot Los Angeles artist Tim Biskup, founded Gama-Go, a San Francisco indie fashion line whose limited-edition hip street wear, prints and toys are being snapped up by young urbanites who appreciate their quirkiness and sense of style.

And that popularity soars on, reflecting a flourishing indie fashion scene, despite the dot-com bust and depressed economy of recent years that ate some clothing enterprises alive. This year, 4-year-old Gama-Go's annual sales approached $1 million.

FREE Conference Calls

Who says there is no free lunch?

"Even without VoIP, the conferencing industry has cause for concern, Gold said, citing FreeConference.com, a California-based operation that enables anyone to use its Web site to set up conferences at no charge beyond the cost of making long-distance calls to its California phone number.

"We're saying the emperor has no clothes," said Warren Jason, president of Integrated Data Concepts, the company that operates FreeConference.com. "Conference calls are easy and they should be cheap. Companies spend thousands of dollars on conferencing when they don't need to."

Jason's conferencing operation runs with just six employees. It makes most of its money selling premium service to large organizations such as General Electric Co. and the U.S. Postal Service. The free service recruits customers by word-of-mouth, so Jason doesn't need a sales force."

"Credit reports -- free for all"

From SFGate.com

"Starting Wednesday, residents of California and 12 other Western states can get a free copy of their credit report from each of the nation's three major credit bureaus once every 12 months.

By September 2005, at the end of a phased rollout, residents of all 50 states will have the same opportunity.

Free credit reports were mandated by the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003, the reincarnation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act."

"The Persuaders"

If you missed the latest FRONTLINE on PBS, be sure to check out the website.

Americans are swimming in a sea of messages.

Each year, legions of ad people, copywriters, market researchers, pollsters, consultants, and even linguists—most of whom work for one of six giant companies—spend billions of dollars and millions of man-hours trying to determine how to persuade consumers what to buy, whom to trust, and what to think. Increasingly, these techniques are migrating to the high-stakes arena of politics, shaping policy and influencing how Americans choose their leaders.

In "The Persuaders," FRONTLINE explores how the cultures of marketing and advertising have come to influence not only what Americans buy, but also how they view themselves and the world around them. The 90-minute documentary draws on a range of experts and observers of the advertising/marketing world, to examine how, in the words of one on-camera commentator, "the principal of democracy yields to the practice of demography," as highly customized messages are delivered to a smaller segment of the market.

"Designing Success"

We couldn't agree more ...

Swenson says he felt a return on his investment even in the confidence he was able to exude when presenting his business card for the first time to potential clients. Today, he says, "everyone in our industry recognizes that logo. People have always thought we were a bigger company than we actually are. It's all about creating a positive impression in the minds of the clients, and it's hard to do that with a stupid little thing you made yourself on Microsoft Word."

Landis Designs 32' Banners for New Bloomingdale's

On Tuesday, the 500,000 pound glass- and steel-dome of the Emporium in San Francisco was raised. In just over a week, Landis Designs designed and delivered the 32' x 10' banners will will grace the site of the new Bloomingdale's unit it will open in Fall 2006.

You can see it here.