National Spending Journal – By Shoeboxed

Like most things, the concept of a “salesman” has changed greatly over the past couple of decades. In the past, the word “salesman” conjured up images of a sharply dressed middle aged man showing up at your door with a briefcase and a sparkling smile, ready to push his wares and services.
Many experts believe that [...]

To get a business going you have to have two things. One is an idea, service, or product. The other is the skill and ability to communicate with particular people about your idea. In the good ole’ days, the only way to communicate with potential customers was to spend money bombarding them with telemarketing calls, [...]

If you haven’t heard about Kentucky Fried Chicken’s new grilled chicken or its recent promotion (backed by Oprah) where you can get a free grilled chicken meal, well, you’ve been hiding in a cave. They’re running tons of TV ads and the Internet is abuzz with the promotion as well.

So when you saturate American media [...]

It’s about time for Shoeboxed to buy another large batch of envelopes for our receipt and business card Mail-In program. We have had lots of people over the last couple of years give us feedback about our envelopes, and we wanted to take this opportunity to solicit your thoughts about our envelope design. That’s why [...]

We had an incredibly exciting first round, with several upsets and amazing comebacks. There were lots of examples of competitors using various social media tools to drive large amounts of votes, and in many cases that made the difference.
Some match-ups show the entire number of votes logged for a particular contest, but we are only [...]

The economy is tough, and you’re looking for a job. But braving career fairs and online job sites can be frustrating and fruitless. Just this week, hundreds camped out for job openings at the Miami fire department.
And, indeed, these are tough times. Unemployment is at a 16-year high (7.2%) and job seekers outnumber openings three [...]

Whether they have a blog that generates revenue in and of itself or a regular website for a company, it is important for small business owners to track the web traffic they are generating.
Knowing who visits a site, how long they stay, and what pages they visit (among many other things), can make it easy [...]

Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that has seen massive growth over the last two years and it can be a boon to any online marketing strategy.
The site allows users to post short messages to all other users that subscribe to their feed, or in Twitter-speak, their “followers”. Messages, or “tweets” have a [...]

In these lean economic times, small businesses should look for ways to cut costs. Though you might not need to alter your entire marketing strategy, the following tips can be helpful to keep the marketing engines running on a little less fuel than normal.

A few months ago, Peter Shankman, a semi-famous social media expert became a full blow Internet celebrity with the launch of Help A Reporter Out, also known as HARO. This is a free service designed to connect you to journalists and bloggers that might be able to help you in your PR efforts.

Shoeboxed has been going extremely well as of late, with many new people signing up and enjoying our mail-in service. We’re happy to see so many people take advantage of this thing we’ve put together. All you new members: you can expect a little something extra in the mail from yours truly this week. Just [...]

Some of us headed up to New York last weekend to show the big city what we’re made of. We pulled onto the Island around 4 am Friday morning sporting our new SUPER RECEIPT SAVER shirts.
Our debut on Wall Street five hours later drew a large crowd. And we met many interesting people. We even [...]

Julia spent a good deal of time today and yesterday organizing our in-house file server. It was really unorganized, but we kind of knew where anything was at any given time. As our team grows though, and we take on summer interns, we felt like it would be a good idea to actually organize it [...]

A lawyer at one of the larger firms around here sent us a pretty funny email the other day that was definitely worth sharing. It’s about his experience at our local airport, RDU.
I just hit the men’s room at RDU before hopping on my flight tonight. Each urinal had a shoeboxed.com business card on top [...]

It’s tough being the Shoeboxed chauffeurs. Executive orders this morning left some important details out, nonetheless we pulled out the sign: “Shoeboxed.com for Bill Gates” and got to work. We patiently waited by the baggage claim.
For some reason, people were shocked that Bill was coming. People quickly found their movie cameras and filmed away. Others [...]