INTERNET IDEAS To share your ideas follow the log in instructions below. Be sure to include your contact info and publications name. If you are uploading an image, be sure to convert it to either a GIF or JPG (300kb max). INSTRUCTIONS TO ENTER YOUR IDEA: CLICK HERE to LOG IN user name login: publisher password: ifpa Then click on the green NEW button. To add a PHOTO you must enter your text, then hit SAVE and then click the UPLOAD box Home & Garden Website www.HG413.com is a directory website designed to help readers find home & garden professionals within our (413) area code. This has brought in thousands of dollars in new revenue for us and has been well received by our readers. For more information contact Barb Perry at Reminder Publications in Massachusetts 413-525-6661 x135 JustSell.com Check out this website. There is a library of very usueful selling tools for both Managers and Sales Representatives. You can also sign up for a daily newsletter that often has invitations to FREE Sales training webinars. www.JustSell.com Sell Sports Photos Online Every week we publish photos from local sports teams in our papers. We have an excellent photograhper that gets pictures of local kids playing basketball, baseball, etc. We also load these photos onto our website and use a company called MY CAPTURE to sell the photos online. Our readers can buy their kids photos right online. And they have a whole bunch of options for the photos: framed, on a coffee mug, t-shirts, etc. MY CAPTURE handles the entire process and sends us a check once a month! Spot Mixer www.SpotMixer.com SpotMixer is a web-based service that makes it easy and affordable for you to reach new customers with video ads online. Why do thousands of businesses choose SpotMixer for video marketing and advertising? Easy - It's the easiest professional video creation and advertising service available online. Affordable - It costs just a fraction of alternative options such as videographers or ad agencies. Effective - Your video ad is targeted to consumers that match your customer profile. Web Design We offer web deisgn services to local businesses in our area. This has been quite succesful. Not only have we designed sites for our regular customers but we have also designed many sites for non-advertisers. Contact: Dan Buendo 413-525-6661 x102 www.ReminderWebDesign.com Expert Advice webpage We get many people each month that ask if they can be our expert in the field they went to school in. While it is a good idea for them to get into our newspapers, they usually want to do it for free. I came up with a program called Expert Advice. How it works is that these 'experts' can write articles to their heart's content. We will publish them on our website. This includes a banner ad to their web page from the articles page, and for the first 30 days, the banner ad will appear on the Expert Advice main page. If they are a current advertiser, we will run an article each month for free. this has built a loyalty that is going very well (see below). If they aren't an advertiser, we charge them a minimal $75 per article if they sign up to write articles each month for a year. If they decide to only write one, the cost is just $150 per article. The articles stay on the site for one year and are archived after that first year. The newest articles are at the top of the category and they move down as new articles come in. We have some people that are writers of books submit articles. One of our writers has had 166 views and 114 clicks to his website in the last four months. He just announced to us that this is great value (even though he only did it once) and is now planning on putting an article per month. We also just got University of Phoenix to have their professors write an article each month that we get paid for. We started this in May but this week alone we have ten new articles that will go online next week. Seven are articles from people that we don't get any other advertising from. Net profit for next week? $825. The advertisers that are using this service for free are becoming our great customers. One doctor was going to quit advertising with us until he was reminded that he gets to do this article each month (his group has done three articles so far). We get $550 per month from him in advertising each month. He just renewed for another year! Boyd Petersen The Valley journals (801) 580-3310 Newspaper NEXT Newspaper Next and the Changing Media Landscape www.NewspaperNEXT.org API urges newspaper executives to consider jobs to be done, not products to be offered. WASHINGTON, DC -- The American Press Institute's Newspaper Next project challenged 90 top newspaper executives at a symposium to change the way they view their business. Instead of looking through a product-focused lens (how do we get more people to read the paper or visit the Web site?), API and Newspaper Next (N2) are encouraging the industry to look through a customer-focused lens. The key questions: What information-based jobs are customers trying to get done, and how can newspaper companies introduce great solutions to help them? Jobs to be done "Customers hire products or services to get jobs done," said Christensen. The key is to figure out what jobs people are trying to get done, and how newspaper companies could develop solutions far better than those currently available. For instance, customers might hire a newspaper to keep them company while they while they are eating alone or waiting at the airport. Or a customer might hire a newspaper to get information about the local community. But, in each of these cases, the newspaper is competing against other media, as well as rivals from different product categories such as a BlackBerry, iPod, or cell phone. When companies segment their market by jobs to be done instead of products to be offered, Christensen said, they find: The market is much larger Their share of the market is smaller Their real competitors aren't in their product category Growth potential is greater, because many potential consumers are not currently consuming at all. Newspapers also need to look at jobs to be done for advertisers. "Newspapers aren't doing a great job of doing jobs for advertisers, and competitors are stepping in," said Clark Gilbert, assistant professor of Harvard Business School and a director of Innosight. Advertisers want a single point of contact and uniform ad sizes across newspapers, better service and the ability to measure the reach of their ads. Many of newspapers' competitors are increasingly providing these services and data. Tom Johnson, News Publishing, Inc. Community newspapers are covering local sports, football games, basketball, volleyball, etc. Video the game and live stream it on your site for fans, family, and community. Archive the game for athlete's to view afterwards as well as coaches. Wrap a ad on the screen player to click through to your site, sell a crawl across the top of the streaming game, place a display box ad next to the streaming game. Have an advetorial column on fitness for game day training maybe an advertiser on how to train mentally, rehab training you offer should a player get injured, etc. Sell to fitness trainers, pizza's to go to before or after games, apparel, merchandisers, fitness equipment and more. PLUS support this project with print display ads that direct readers to the "Game Time" online feature with ad dollars built into this advertising. Tom Johnson, News Publishing, Inc. 608-836-1601 x223 Middleton WI Electronic Tear Sheets Done Dirt Cheap So let me motivate you to read this. What will electronic Tear Sheets do for me? 1. It will eliminate the postage on those big envelopes. 2. It will eliminate the printed envelopes, ours are 50 cents each. 3. It will eliminate the mess of tearing your papers apart. 4. It will possibly save time depending on your computer person. 5. It will make your customer happier getting their Tearsheets weekly. 6. It gives you an archive that allows you to send them a dozen times if needed. 7. Your color reproduction is not in question because the PDF is always perfect. 8. It will save you money and make you look more proficient and professional. So what will it cost to set it up? You will need Adobe Distiller. You have this if you are currently creating PDFs of your paper for your in-house press or printer. You will also need to pick up a Pro version of Adobe PDF Reader. The PRO version allows you to extract one page out of a multiple page PDF. You will need a person with a little knowledge of storing files in folders and email. You know; someone under the age of 30. What we do is take the PDF we use to send to the press room and save a copy of it in our Tear Sheet folder on the computer. This is our working document should we mess it up. We keep all of our working PDFs and customer folders inside the Tear Sheet folder. We start scrolling through the PDF document till we find a customer who needs a tear sheet. We are working in a PRO version of Adobe PDF Reader which allows us to extract that page from the original document. The extracted page is now a second file unto itself without changing the original file. That file is then saved in a folder for that customer needing the tear sheet. The page will be the exact same page as was printed in your paper only in an electronic PDF format file. When saving the file in the customer s folder we do a couple things to keep them sorted out. Inside the customer folder we have a folder for each month. We also change the name of the file so it has an abbreviation of the paper name and the date of that paper. This helps when you get ready to email and if you have to resend it a dozen times because your customer is brain dead. If you have to resend the Tear Sheet it is just an email. We often find that a page may have three tear sheet customers on it. We just keep saving it into multiple customer folders. When we are done with that page we delete the file and go back to the original document looking for more tear sheet customers. This is where a little care is needed. Make sure you are saving just that single page and not the original, multiple page, document. Also make sure you delete the correct file, this is why you work with the copy of the original. Once you have saved the Tear Sheets in the customer s file you go to your email program. In that program you have all the email addresses for the recipients identified by customer in your email address book. Create an email for each recipient of a tear sheet, attach the PDF of their page and send it. Once you have the email done, back up your tear sheet folder and you are done. HOW DO YOU START? Small! Find a couple of customers that will work with you and do it for a month. Once the word gets out customers will be calling you to get on the list. We had about half of our customers on board with very little effort. By starting small you don t have to retrieve and put in the address book 150 addresses at once. We were adding a dozen a week. We then pushed our sales people to get customers on board and that picked up about another forth of them. We then sent out a notice in our bills for two months stating we would charge $5.00 (five dollars) for Tear Sheets starting in two months. This brought in all but about a dozen. We still send them hard copies and don t charge them, it got the job done. It also made us go through our Tear Sheet list and sort out those that really don t need them but have always gotten them. We eliminated about 30 of them. THINGS TO WATCH! When you gather your email addresses use a paper address book to write them down. Email address books can get corrupted and are difficult to back up. We have the company name, contact and phone number written down. If someone complains they didn t get the Tear Sheet, ask if someone new is doing the job. Confirm the email address, often you will find mistakes in translation by the time you get the address. We also have some national accounts that have their Tear Sheets sent to three people. We make a group of the three email addresses and send it to the group with one email. Make sure and back up your tear sheet folder. This can quickly represent a lot of information and work you don t want to loss. Check your email connection. We have had trouble with hotmail, gmail and other email providers. They will eliminate attachments from email and will not tell the sender or recipient. Do a couple trial runs and make sure your connection can handle not only the attachments but give you the speed to make it work. It can be done with little expense, probably no more time and a big cost savings. There are publications out there that have too many Tear Sheets to do this; there are commercial systems to handle large volumes. They usually are not cheap. Some may have to look at their email connections and upgrade them to make this work. But this is how we do Tear Sheets Done Dirt Cheap. Green Banner Pub Contact: Joe Green Phone: 812/967-3176 Email: paperman@gbpnews.com