Hey Reader!

Welcome to Issue #16 of NGI Presents!

Advertising Your Business

In the past, I talked about advertising NGI to gain clientele. I've done digital, print, direct marketing, and flyers. Mr. Lisa told me that if you get a 1% return rate of your advertising dollars, you're doing well in the sales world. I've gotten clients from digital, print, and flyers. The problem, however, is that those advertising efforts are location-based, meaning the digital and print ads are for the county newspapers, and the flyers are also posted on county-wide community boards.

I've been in touch with a regional newspaper (covers all of N. Michigan) that has a very impressive open rate on their newsletter. Mr. Lisa thinks we should continue doing what works, but I think we should also add email marketing. I sell content services, and my clientele will likely read the newsletter rather than pick up one of the local newspapers. I'm playing around with pricing to see what fits NGI's needs, and the salesperson has been super helpful.

And if you are in N. Michigan, the newsletter is from the Traverse City and Leelanau County Tickers.

I have a list of things I need to spend NGI money on, and while advertising is on the list, I'd like to get a professional website first so that potential customers will have a great website to peruse when I advertise.

Also, speaking of advertising, I need to redo the flyers because,, after some consideration, Mr. Lisa and I don't think they clearly state what I offer.

Updating NGI Website

This brings me to the website itself. It runs on WordPress and uses the Elementor drag-and-drop website builder to create said website. Elementor is a paid plugin, and you pay per website. The Lisa Rabey empire has five websites, each with a specific topic. Running Elementor on all five would be very expensive since it's a yearly cost, so I'm moving away from there to Divi, another drag-and-drop website builder that is as robust but cheaper than Elementor.

With all that being said, the only website I want professionally done is NGI's because, as a business, I should project a professional image to potential clients.

I will meet with the website designer tomorrow to catch up, and I'll have her give me a quote again. I don't need branding or website maintenance, so hopefully, it won't break the bank. The new website should happen, hopefully, in the next six months.

What Does NGI Do Exactly

When I started putting together a list of services I wanted to offer, Sloth made it clear to specialize rather than have a wide array of what I offer. I thought this made sense, so I removed the IT services and kept it to content and online stuff.

The problem, however, is that most of my clientele call me for IT services. These are all local clients, so going to their homes or places of work was simple. I would answer yes when they asked if I could fulfill their requests. If I didn't know how to do that thing, I'd research it because that added another tool to my toolbox. (It also prompted me to take a course on that tool since I would use it myself for NGI.)

With Mr. Lisa on board, we've tossed around the idea that I remain doing the content and online presence while he takes care of the general IT. We would not rebrand NGI but instead would do an offshoot side-side hustle, call it NGI Technologies, and offer those IT services. Now that idea is on hold because Mr. Lisa is interviewing with local IT companies and if he gets hired, he would not be able to do the NGI IT work and with the demands of my 9-5 jobs and NGI, I couldn't take IT work on.

So, who knows where NGI Technologies is going to go?

Tech Tip

Tip: Backups

Why: The rule of thumb for backing up data follows the 3-2-1 approach. You should have three backups: two different local media, such as a thumb drive or external drive, and one in the cloud, such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

How often you should back up varies from expert to expert, but typically daily for sensitive data (financial records and similar), weekly for semi-sensitive data (documents, images, and such), and monthly for everything else. Is this a realistic plan? Depends on what you keep on your computer. The only sensitive data I keep on my laptop is my back-up codes for MFA (multi-factor authentication), and I back it up to two separate cloud services. I also use our home server as one of the local media backups.

While we're speaking of backups, if you're on social media, you should regularly download your content. Depending on your activity, the time frame can vary from network to network but I recommend once a quarter. Instructions on downloading your data from social media networks are available on their support sites.

Meme of the Week

See you in a few weeks!

Lisa. Mr. Lisa, and Thursday

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