No matter what you think of them, within the next 18 months, blogs will change your business.

Blogs are altering the world of business as we know it, redefining marketing, public relations, and customer communications, to name a few. If you aren’t embarrassing this change into your own marketing mix, if you haven’t started to use this marketing phenomenon, your competitors are, and I guarantee they’ll leave you in the dust wondering where your sales have gone and why your customers are deserting you in droves.

Blogs are not only here to stay, but they will have an effect on your business. The question is, will you use blogs to benefit your business, or will you ignore them and experience negative consequences that takes you completely by surprise?

If you are interested in the future of your company, you need to understand and start blogging.

Business Week, Fortune, Smart Company Wired, even People and Entertainment Weekly, are just a few of the magazines that are buzzing about a reinvention of web pages that are called weblogs, or blogs for short.

Believe it or not there are still people that think of blogs as online diaries or journals. The tide has turned as a small handful of forward-thinkers, leaders in the march to tomorrow, have recognized that blogs are having much more of a profound impact on the world of digital communications then we have ever seen.

If you don’t have a blog yet - stay tuned. I think in the next week I can convince you that must change.

It’s easy to track your results with postcards since you can tell recipients to bring the card into your store to redeem it for a special discount. Or direct them to use a special ordering code when purchasing from your website.

Postcards can be produced on a very tight production schedule. Postcards are simple to create and send, there is no assembling, collating, stuffing, licking envelopes, etc.

The hardest part of sending a postcard is putting on the stamp.

Your postcards can brand you and your business in ways that most marketing materials cannot. Once you start and then stick to a regular postcard mailing program, you and your business will gain a reputation, perhaps even a little notoriety.