Business Blog | Lilamitre-arte.com

Since the 19th century business cards were widespread among people of all classes with a business to promote. The earliest form of business cards, known as tradecards, were used as advertising materials and as maps used to direct the public to the merchant’s store. Today business cards are among the most important marketing material that every business must have.

The business card is perhaps the best salesman that you can have. That is why it is essential that it contains much more than your name, address, and contact numbers and services. It should be designed keeping its purpose in mind – that is its being a powerful sales tool. So let’s start with the design. If you want to create a business card that contains a photo with gradient colors you can try using a glossy paper to ensure that the cards are printed as good as they look on the screen. Or else, you can get disappointed with the print out.

In addition, if your card design contains background color or images, you can use papers that have gaps between them as these gaps will allow you to make up for the unavoidable elusiveness of the printer paper feed system. However, most stock cards don’t have gaps so if you don’t want to have trouble with printing, make sure your photos, images and text are at 3mm off the edge of the card. This way the minor printer imprecision will not destroy your business cards.
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There’s a clear way around press release failure and it’s called the pitch. A lot like it sounds a pitch is a fast throw at busy editors about a possible story. If they want to find out more, then you send the press release.

That leads me to a huge pet peeve: Sending out press releases via e-mail to a list of editors. From my experience it’s never – ever – worked. I no longer try it and suggest you don’t either. It’s a waste of your time and all of the editors. Instead:

1. Focus on a handful of your “dream publications.” For me, I’d like to get into Fortune Small Business, Entrepreneur magazine and the Wall Street Journal. When picking your publications, think of your target audience. What do they read and why do they read it?

2. Pick the section you’d like to appear in. You never know, but chances are you won’t appear on the cover of the publication in your first attempt at placement, instead, focus on sidebars, resource listings and short news sections. Almost all print pubs have them. Look at it as the waiting room for bigger and better stories on the unique products and/or services you offer.
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Picture yourself entering a corporate meeting, team meeting, or business meeting. There you are sitting in the room, while someone in the “expert” or “boss” chair speaks to you or at you. There you are, not aligned with that person’s mission or vision. There you are, feeling apart from the process. There you are, lacking energy and the desire for being there. There you are, hearing what is going wrong and what you or your team or department needs to change or improve. How are you feeling?

Are you feeling a great connection to the meeting? Are you feeling enthusiastic about being in attendance at the meeting? Are you fully present at the meeting? Are you deeply tuned in and listening with your heart and your head? Are you inspired to co-create, participate, and contribute? Or, are you ready to fall asleep, or count the minutes of what you feel is wasted time?

My experience in my two plus decades of being in business and in coaching business clients around the world is that the system of meetings, clearly, must change. Most meetings don’t include participant involvement and actually serve to tune people out rather than tune them in, and as a result, the intention of the meeting falls short of its purpose. In other words, they really can be a waste of precious company time.

The process of Meeting Alignment, that we’ve been teaching companies around the world, has allowed them to use a systematic process that engages people in meetings and creates a desire for them to contribute and fully participate in these business meetings.

The Meeting Alignment Process and the results it creates include:

A desire to co-create: The purpose of a meeting isn’t to get across “your” agenda; it shifts to sharing your thoughts and hearing fully the thoughts and ideas of others to co-create the meeting purpose and actions.

Deep tuning in: Most meetings involve people talking and listening to themselves. The Meeting Alignment Process teaches people to fully listen with their hearts and to listen beyond the words to what is not said, to emotions, and to fully hear others.
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In “On Networking Groups – Part One”, I spoke briefly about the four types of networking groups. Now, let’s take a look at a category of networking groups.

One category that most people are familiar with is the Chamber Of Commerce. Chambers serve a long standing role in the business community. It is a role of development and support. A Chamber Of Commerce can offer business both small and large with networking opportunities, training programs, legislative assistance and a host of other benefits. A Chamber Of Commerce can be a local, statewide, national, or international organization with separate memberships for each. If you belong to an area Chamber of Commerce, you do not belong to a state or national Chamber. Each plays their own role in the business community.

Some Chambers of Commerce take more of a role in the community to influence policy while others might focus more on business development. Most of them however have a wealth of information for the member that goes unused by most.

For example, let’s say you have a business and you have a question about a city ordinance that relates to your business. Most often a Chamber of Commerce can provide you with the answer to your question. Each of them has a database of members that can often be accessed through some point. Usually computers are made available to members with databases that can be searched for information on other members.

When looking for networking opportunities within a Chamber Of Commerce, most people think only of leads groups or the common after hours. The reality is that any function hosted by a chamber of commerce holds opportunities for networking with other business owners and business leaders.
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