I've been doing some serious research on different blog platforms to determine the best/easiest ways to integrate a blog into a more complex website. I was able to successfully code a Blogger (Google) blog to weave seemlessly into a more full-featured website for the God and Country Festival in Nampa.

I also managed to turn a blog into a custom order status system for an electronics repair shop. The possibilities that blogs provide for integration into the websites of businesses and ministries is really endless. I believe blogging is now an essential part of communicating with customers and clients on the Internet.

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Designing paper marketing materials like business cards and brochures can be a fun exercise, especially for a new business. It somehow makes an idea seem more real and respectable. But these things can get expensive relative to the value they create. As a result, it's quite easy to overspend on the design and printing of slick brochures.

Larger businesses, of course, are justified in purchasing large quantities of slick marketing materials. But most small businesses can get by in the early years with materials that come right out of an office color laser printer. At Bastien, we consistently landed multi-million dollar projects using little or no offset printing (aside from business cards).

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You'd have to have lived under a rock not to know the value of the Internet in marketing your business. But simply putting a webpage out there doesn't really constitute brilliant marketing, any more than sticking a sign on the front of your place of business. That's the bare minimum you need to do, but frankly, everyone else is already doing that.

The days of website-as-billboard are over. Today's web surfers, particularly those looking for a new home, are increasingly sophistocated. They want to find useful information. They may not be seeking to contact you yet. But it's your website's job to put that thought into their heads.

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I have always been interested in business development, marketing, and public relations, but the path I took to apply these interests professionally was as an architect. I studied architecture at Cal Poly, Pomona, and through a series of job experiences, became Marketing Director at Bastien and Associates, Inc. Archtecture and Planning.

I spent over six years there, first as an intern, then as an architect and project manager, and finally as Marketing Director. I enjoyed the challenges of learning so many different parts of the business, but there was nothing I enjoyed more than the challenging of growing the business. I did this with a number of tools:

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My public relations philosophy is simple: Establish a genuinely helpful relationship with members of the press who are most likely to cover the topics I'm interested in.

There is no magic way to get covered by the mainstream media, or even alternative news outlets. Writing a press release can be helpful, but spending a lot of money on wire services does not always do the trick. That should be obvious when you think about it, because that's what everyone does. When you send out a release on the newswire, you are competing with millions of other news releases that day. What's going to make your story stand out?

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