Quite often, we’re handed a project, ask the nec­es­sary ques­tions, pro­duce great work and move on to the next prospect. It’s a model that has made a lot of free­lancers great income through­out the ages.

But why stop with one project?

One of the more dif­fi­cult things we encounter as busi­ness own­ers is the art of cold call­ing to expand our busi­ness. But why go through all of the effort when you have clients from your past who are per­fectly capa­ble of being your clients of the future?

I encour­age you to dive deep into your Rolodex and remain in con­tact with ALL of your clients. Build con­ver­sa­tion with them, cre­ate a data­base you can ref­er­ence for years to come.

For exam­ple, I make note in my address book regard­ing impor­tant answers to my ques­tions: does my client con­tact have kids, what is their favorite food, do they have pets, etc.  Those notes allow me to pick up dia­log right away with­out miss­ing a beat.  It doesn’t mean that I don’t value each of the peo­ple in my Rolodex … it just means that my Rolodex is too large to remem­ber all of the details. My data­base allows me to keep up.

As you build your Rolodex, you can watch for pat­terns and have the oppor­tu­nity to con­nect those in your net­work. Build Karma points by con­nect­ing a favorite pack­age designer with an inven­tor look­ing to gain shelf space in local gro­cery stores. More than likely, those who have been helped by you are happy to return the favor down the road.

It’s all about who you know, but also what you know about them.

Yes that’s right, I called it Gotcha. So why Gotcha? Sim­ple really, it’s not as involved as a Captcha (also not as secure but will fend off most spam­bots). Below I have writ­ten a very sim­ple Con­tact form in PHP, I will explain the goods right after the form. Read the rest of this entry »

This is about what some clients want you to do in order to accom­plish their over­all goal, which usu­ally ends up com­ing back to you the designer as a neg­a­tive project both you and the cus­tomer. Maybe we could get a good rap­port on how to effec­tively guide a client out of the mind­set that hav­ing a project done faster doesn’t always equate to hav­ing it done better.

One type of client may want to have their web­site up by the end of the week so that they can be ready to “make money” over the week­end. But I have found that if you sac­ri­fice your time in test­ing and ensur­ing proper usabil­ity the web­site will ini­tially flop. It is best to have a good plan of action and stick to it. The client like this I have found will nor­mally want a large project done and wait until two days before their desired dead­line to get you essen­tial project information.

Say your job is print related, star­ing at the MAR+APR 2008 Cre­ate mag­a­zine sit­ting beside me I can see a ton of work going into some of the ads placed in here. So if I was design­ing for some­thing like this; where obvi­ously dead­line is an issue. I may have to steer the client out of the tar­get issue if their over­all brand or idea wasn’t prop­erly por­trayed, sug­gest­ing the fol­low­ing issues print dead­line for a more suc­cess­ful campaign.

How do oth­ers han­dle clients like these?

As you prob­a­bly know, tra­di­tion­ally, the “sweet spot” for most mar­keters has been the con­sumers who occupy the cov­eted 18–34 age bracket. While is has become a commonly-accepted ‘fact’ that this group spends and spends fre­quently, the REAL FACT being over­looked by many Amer­i­can mar­keters is that 18–34 is not the only demo­graphic “sweet spot.” There is another group of con­sid­er­able size, pos­sess­ing far more spend­ing power, that’s almost ignored in the strate­gic plans of many of our most promi­nent marketers.

Who are these “emerg­ing” con­sumers fly­ing under today’s mar­ket­ing radar screen? Why, they’re just our Baby Boomers. Con­sumers age 40 to 70, nearly 100 mil­lion strong, with annual spend­ing power of more than $2.1 tril­lion — seven times the spend­ing power of Gen­er­a­tions X and Y combined.

Recent stud­ies prove Baby Boomers still have what it takes in the spend­ing department:

• Peo­ple over 40 spend 65% more than any other age group
• The aver­age house­hold buys 13 cars in a life­time – nine of them after age 40
• One of Nintendo’s fastest grow­ing new prod­ucts is Wii Bowl­ing. Their biggest cus­tomers? Retire­ment homes. They call it “Wii-habbing”
• The 45–75 age group spent $97 bil­lion in house­hold fur­nish­ings and $32 bil­lion in the drug cat­e­gory in 2004, 14% and 148% more, respec­tively, than con­sumers age 44 and under
• The aver­age age of a Harley David­son buyer is 48

Enter thirdgear, a Chicago-based mar­ket­ing con­sul­tancy with a fresh new focus on the Baby Boomer gen­er­a­tion. thirdgear, in part­ner­ship with Mil­len­nium, a UK-based adver­tis­ing agency, is com­mit­ted to its mis­sion of bring­ing mar­keters closer to the mil­lions of con­sumers over 40 who helped set the tone for today’s con­sumer landscape.

thirdgear has cre­ated a pro­pri­etary panel of con­sumers over 40 called gear­heads. These active, highly involved, highly opin­ion­ated think tankers are not shy about shar­ing their ideas and opin­ions on about every­thing from prod­uct design to pack­ag­ing to advertising.

And, in response to this boom­ing mar­ket, thirdgear co-founded IMMN, the Inter­na­tional Mature Mar­ket­ing Net­work. The association’s mis­sion is to cham­pion mature mar­ket­ing around the world and cur­rently has mem­bers from Aus­tralia, New Zealand, Japan, Eng­land and the United States, includ­ing noted mar­ket­ing con­sul­tants and authors such as Marti Bar­letta and Dick Stroud.

To learn more about thirdgear, check out their Web site, www.thirdgear.com or reach out to Jenna at 773.715.0879 or jenna@snackboxlabs.com.

Ever run across a good arti­cle on a web­site, but you were about to punch the time­card, or head away from the com­puter? What do you usu­ally do, you can drag it to your over­low­ing book­mark bar where you will undoubtably for­get about it for a few weeks. Maybe you post it to your del.icio.us account instead, or some other book­mark­ing site, where again you usu­ally for­get about it. I find it’s help­ful to just hit command+p (ctrl+p for the PC user) and nor­mally get just an awfully layed out print of the page, and nor­mally it has some con­tent cut off, well that was use­less and not very green to waste the paper and ink right?

After a week of find­ing arti­cles and not being able to get a decent print I aimed to fix it for our site, and then write about how oth­ers could do the same. If your a designer and your get­ting a lot of traf­fic it stands to rea­son that some­one may at some point print out your arti­cle for later reading.

Read the rest of this entry »