Difficulties marketing yourself December 5, 2009
Posted by jbloemker in Where's Daddy Graphics.Tags: business cards, Edwardsville, marketing, print, small business, St. Louis, website
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When you open for business, you want to spend as little money as possible to start with. This can make getting the word out a tedious and daunting task. You have to stay on top of your business. However, even devoting your days to marketing your company can prove fruitless and tiresome. Below, you will find a breakdown of the difficulties I have been encountering.
- Your business cards need to be printed with quality. – My wife controls the finances in my house. I just work like a dog. Unfortunately that means any expenditures I encounter need to be approved. So, getting my cards to the shop that i know has excellent quality (also a minimum order) is my first hurdle. I have gotten some printed at the local office supply store. The quality left a bad taste in my mouth for the print jobs in the corner of the store.
- Pass them out. – If you have a family to feed and shelter, your business is probably not your only job. If this is true, you may not have enough time between jobs to do much social interaction and get the cards passed out. I am currently working 3 jobs if you include my own business.
- Get a website up. – The cheapest way to do this is to build it yourself. This is not too hard with the free templates out there. The pain in the butt part is the free web hosting. You always get that sub-domain. It can make your website’s address ugly. In most cases you can buy the domain of your choice for only a few dollars a month, or even per year.
- Then you have to promote your site – This can bee one of the most difficult and expensive tasks. Start by submitting your site to search engines. Many of the submission sites give you good advice on how to get a better rank. You will also find some free tools to help you with meta tags that help the search engines find you. The expensive part is when you begin to try to set up links to your site on other sites. I prefer not to use link exchange sites because you can easily end up with some not so desireable graphics on your site. You can also end up with many links and no content.
- The most important one is the word of mouth. – One thing to always remember… “One disatisfied customer speaks louder than 10 happy customers.” Always, I repeat, always do your job to the best of your abilities if not better.
Those are the current hurdles i am dealing with at the moment. Feel free to provide advice or or bring new, inexpensive ideas for marketing. That is all I have for now. I may ad to this posting at a later time.
Protect yourself and your work! November 30, 2009
Posted by jbloemker in Where's Daddy Graphics.Tags: Edwardsville, Graphics, marketing, print, small business, St. Louis
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When you have a skill or trade that you can sell, you need to protect your self. With graphics design, many people think that you have the copyright when you create the image. In a sense you do. However, as I recently found out, you need to protect your rights.
I recently worked on a project where the customer wanted a new sign for his shop. I had just made a contact with someone who could build the sign from my design. ”Great,” I thought! I began to get quotes and put together some design ideas. The customer was excited, when he saw the print out I gave him of my concepts.
I gave him a few days to look them over and make a decision. I noticed his mother’s obituary posted in the local paper. I gave him a call. apologized for his loss. He told me he wanted to put the project on hold for a while. No problem, very understandable. I tried to get back in touch with him a little bit later, but he was never at his shop.
A couple weeks went by of me stopping by his shop to find no sign of the guy. Then, one night running to the store, I see a sign hanging with my design. I was furious. He never paid me for the design. It was only about $40, but that would buy a couple christmas presents at my house.
So I started keeping an eye on his shop to try to catch him while he was there. No luck. Finally, I put together an invoice and dropped it by his shop, which he never locks the door on. It has been a week now since I dropped off the invoice. I am hoping to hear from him soon. I still keep my eye out for him to be at the shop.
The unfortunate thing is the copyright law. It was created to protect the designers. However, for small, local projects, it would cost me more money to get my money. I may have to let this one go and learn from my mistake.
What I learned from my mistake is to create a disclaimer that goes at the bottom of my print outs. This disclaimer will need a clause that awards me damages for my efforts to collect. I will also need to place a watermark on all images before the final art has been exchanged for money.
So like I said, protect yourself and your work!
Red Cross vs. FEMA November 26, 2009
Posted by jbloemker in Political/Economical.Tags: disaster, hurricane, Red Cross
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When you live in an area that is plagued by natural disasters on a regular basis, you find out who you can turn to for assistance. My family was in Florida when a hurricane did millions of dollars of damage to the majority of the state. FEMA was supposed to be providing help. However, they were days late and past the downed power lines waiting for families to risk their lives to come to them. The Red Cross came to us!
We were living in a mobile home community right off the highway. Our home was old and falling apart as it was. My father-in-law had just had his new trailer placed on the pad a few doors down. It hadn’t even passed inspection yet. We were all living in this shell of a house when the storm came. The walls rattled and shook. The windows leaked. The doors leaked.
As the wind and the rain let up from one of the bands blowing past, we ran to the other trailer. I carried my 4 year old son, covering his head from anything that might fly through the air at 60 -70 mph. We made it safely to the other, more structurally sound home.
The water had been hooked up, so we could flush the toilet sparingly. But the sewage lines were not set up right and our tub regurgitated the sewage. We had to boil water. Our refrigeration was gone, so much of our food was too. The nights were long and uneasy.
After the storm passed, we ventured out to see the damage. Our neighbors roofs were collapsed or peeled off the structure. We wandered over to our place to assess the damage. We were horrified to see our insulation strung across the yard. We had lost two whole walls of our bedroom. The awning was nowhere to be found.
The power lines were down across the streets in all directions. We were trapped in the trailer park untill they got it cleared up. No telling when that would be. We were on the outskirts of Ft. Lauderdale.
After the power company got the power cut off for the downed lines, we ventured out to get gas. No filling stations had any. The ones that did, had lines 1-2 miles long. We found out that FEMA had a relief station at the park down the street from out house. We headed there only to find out that they were not set up to help yet.
A couple days passed as we rationed our shrinking food supply. Then a neighbor knocked on our door and told us that the Red Cross was there by the pool giving out food and water. We went down there, and sure enough they brought the help to us!
They had a van full of water, MRE’s and hot meals. We waited in line with the rest of our neighbors. They had enough for the whole park. They asked how many people we had, we told them there were 4 of us and they gave us 8 water bottles and four meals. They came back every day for 2 weeks, 3 times a day! There was one day they had to go help another community, they asked if I could help them pass out the rest. With a humbled and dutiful wave rushing through me, I took the responsibility of following their lead.
So, I guess what I am trying to say is, support your Red Cross! They have been helping for more than a century. Help them continue helping us!
Where’s Daddy? November 26, 2009
Posted by jbloemker in Where's Daddy Graphics.add a comment
You can find this posting on another page, but I wanted to share it with you mixed in with my regular posts.
The company and blog name implies a question. That question being, “Where is Daddy?” So On this page I will answer that question for you.
- Daddy is in his office working on a new illustration, print or web advertisement, or he is producing another website for a client.
- Daddy is out of the office selling to potential customers. He has a few samples under his arm to woo these potential customers. This is not Daddy’s favorite part of the job, but he is growing used to it.
- He may be in the office bidding on jobs online.
- He may also be getting quotes on printing costs for any current project he has.
- He may be at one of his other two jobs trying to pay the bills.
- Last but probably the most necessary, he may be eating or sleeping. This won’t take long.
On occasion he has been known to be with his family that he loves so much that he works 3 jobs to provide for them. Give Daddy a visit at the Where’s Daddy Graphics website.
Introducing “Daddy” November 25, 2009
Posted by jbloemker in Where's Daddy Graphics.Tags: Edwardsville, Graphics, online, prepress, print, small business, St. Louis
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Welcome to the Where’s Daddy Graphics blog.
I am Jarid Bloemker, the owner and operator of Where’s Daddy Graphics. I am also “Daddy”. I am going to use this post to tell you a bit about myself and my experience as a graphic designer.
I have been a step-father for about 4-5 years now. My step-son has only ever known me as his daddy. That is what he calls me. I also have a step-daughter. She lives with her dad, so she doesn’t call me daddy. That is fine with me. I don’t want to come between her and her father at all. They have a strong bond. I also have a little girl made from my own seed. She is not quite 2 yet.
When I am working on my graphics in my home office I close the door so that the little one won’t try to climb me while I am trying to make money. While I work, I can hear her on the other side of the door, “Where’s Daddy?” So that is where I got the name for my business.
Now a little bit about my experience.
I got my first taste of the graphic design business as a teen. I was commissioned to produce graphics for a local christian rock band. I drew pictures, they paid me for it. That was when I realized that I wanted to be a graphic designer.
After high school I went to a trade school in Florida where I studied commercial art. I started in computer programing, but switched majors. My instructors had worked in the field. They weren’t able to give me the focused attention they wanted to. I think this was due to the other student’s who had never drawn anything creative before. I ended up graduating with honors.
Before I was done with my degree, I acquired my first “real” job in the field. It was at an art studio. The owner of the studio had worked in the industry for more than a decade. I went in and he threw me right into the fire. I actually botched my first project there. I botched it bad! He saw that I was eager to learn more and show what I could do. He gave me almost complete control and access to the studio. I spent 3 years there playing with all the tools he gave me access to.
For the next few years spent in a couple of print shops. The first one I worked in the prepress department. This shop was a very fast paced shop. On most of the jobs they offered 24 hour turnaround. We were printing about 60-70 pieces a day and up to 100 business cards every day. It was my job to lay the pieces out on the press sheets. Then I had to make the plates for the press. In this shop I spent quite a bit of time hanging around the pressman and asking him questions. I wanted to know everything about how to run a press. He let me help him out from time to time.
The next shop i didn’t work with the presses so much. I was the lead designer. It was my job to make sure the designs were done and fit the die cuts. Almost every job there got die cut. I had to make a few custom die cuts too.
While still in Florida, I got my first freelance catalog job. I helped the customer with everything from the photo shoot to the press checks.
I then moved to Illinois, just outside of St. Louis, Mo. I picked up some freelance work there too. One of my jobs was for the illustrations for a math text book. They had a 65 page book on how to dray them. The specs were very detailed, from the size of the illustration to how far the text could be from the illustration.
I currently work in a local newspaper. I don’t really do much for the printing aspect of the newspaper. I handle the online functionality of the website for the paper. I also maintain the computers the paper uses to operate. That is where my computer programing background comes in. I now make the motion ads on the papers site, and manage when they are up and when they come down. I also set up the online contests that the paper hosts.
That about sums it up for me experience. Come back for my next article. That will be more about Where’s Daddy Graphics. To see the website for Where’s Daddy Graphics just click anywhere that i have mentioned the name of the company.
