Salt Lake City-based franchising company AlphaGraphics is in the midst of a major expansion effort and has its sights set on El Paso.

The company, which provides marketing and visual communications solutions for small- and medium-sized businesses, plans to open its first El Paso location in the next six months to a year, said Art Coley, senior director of franchise development.

The company hopes to have three to four El Paso stores, all of which will be franchises, within three years, he added.

"The shortest and simplest way (to describe us) is we are a solution provider," Coley said. "We provide marketing and visual communications for small- and medium-sized businesses. What does that mean? Everything from Web sites, e-mail campaigns, direct mailing, printing services for business cards and letterheads.

Harte-Hanks Launches New Web Platform www.citdb.com to Make Tech Contacts Easily Available to Emerging Marketers

Harte-Hanks, Inc. (NYSE: HHS), a worldwide direct and targeted marketing company, announced today the release of an e-commerce platform designed to provide small and emerging technology marketers and sellers easy access to technology contacts across North America, Europe and South America. The new site, http://www.citdb.com, allows technology companies with small marketing budgets to search and select contacts from the Harte-Hanks Ci Technology Database (CiTDB), a source of rich installed technology content from 700,000 business sites on three continents.

CiTDB.com users can focus their search on a very specific geographical area or market sector, and rent a list of contacts they want, entirely online by credit card. The data made available are name, company, mailing address and telephone number based on the user's query, but without the location's technology profile information that is only associated with a full CiTDB subscription.

Spam nuisance 'can be combated'

Consumers are becoming increasingly angry about rampant SMS and email spam, but what they do not know is that the law is on their side and that there are ways to stop and even prosecute persistent spammers. This was the message from Cape Town-based privacy lawyer Brendan Hughes, of Michalson and Associates, in a presentation on data privacy legislation to Durban businesses last week. Hughes, a member of the appeals panel that adjudicates complaints for the Wireless Application Service Providers' Association (Waspa), said that direct marketing using consumers' personal information was "big business". However, Hughes said businesses that continued to send marketing material or spam to consumers who had asked to be removed from mailing lists could be criminally prosecuted under Section 45 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act of 2002.

How to stop junk mail

Junk mail. Piles of it. In your mailbox, every day. You don't want it. Most of the time, you didn't ask for it. But when it arrives, you have to "do" something with it: Shred it. Trash it. Recycle it.You'll probably never eliminate "all" the mail you don't want. But with a little effort, you can remove your name from enough mailing lists and databases to cut down some of the clutter.We've rounded up some of the best tips for opting out of the direct-mail deluge. Follow these steps and you're bound to lessen your mail carrier's load.Remember: You won't see results right away, because a lot of direct mail is prepared and addressed in advance. So wait at least two or three months before you throw up your hands in disgust.It's a painstaking process -- but so is handling all that junk mail, right?Credit card offersIf you're not shopping for a new credit card, opt out of those pre-approved offers.

Customer Surveys: A Powerful Link Building Tool

One of the most effective link building tools I use is a customer survey. Surveys are usually written from a customer service standpoint: companies want to know the opinions of the people who buy from them and crave feedback on how they're doing. Honorable intentions for sure but in today's link marketing, it's less about where customers stand and more about where they're going.

In the past, I provided a general questionnaire to the company that contracted my linking services, then pulled demographic information from the site's web logs. Using web logs is still a viable tactic but I've come to understand that today's Internet is different and I need to adapt what I do along with it. The explosion of Web 2.0 and social media type sites is changing the way we work and the way I market for links.