For many business owners, the process of balancing resources for reaching existing customers and attracting new business can be a difficult task. Advertising business services and products can be done by direct marketing, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, internet sites, mail, promotional giveaways, and more. No matter how your business implements its marketing strategy, the purpose behind all the methods used is to stay connected to the people who purchase your products, and to increase public awareness based on what your company can afford to spend.

Problems with using mass media approaches are in the level of noise and expense your business will have to fight its way though to capture attention. Placing adds in newspapers, television advertisements, and other forms of mass advertising can lead to high costs with ineffective results. That is why it is called mass media; you have to do a lot of it to reach the people you want to target. Despite these problems, mass media can work well for some, if you have a big enough budget, good advertising copy, and the ability to reach enough people to build interest in what you have to sell. Since everyone likes to get free stuff, adding the right promotional items to the mix can help to augment your advertising dollars, and give you a means for allowing your customers to help advertise your business for you. Traditional promotional items include things like shirts, cups, pens, hats, bumper stickers, and other inexpensive giveaway items. These are things that you can give customers when they visit your business, or let your sales force leave at the site when calling on your customers.

In recent years, more companies have rushed to become part of the potential represented by marketing on the internet. With this media, some interesting and quite irritating new approaches began to surface. The phenomenon of mass emailing quickly turned into an unrelenting sea of spam advertising, gaudy banner ads, spyware, annoying pop up ads, site linking, and expensive pay per click search engine advertising aimed at ushering people to buy products and services on otherwise invisible web site locations. The internet developed more noise, faster than any other form of traditional marketing media. For the internet, powerful search engine companies rose to become the undisputed brokers for doing business successfully. The overwhelming focus of all the new techniques associated with the internet involve finding the best way to obtain the coveted front page position of a search engine query for whatever information people are trying to find.

Strangely enough, it is sometimes easier to draw attention to your web services by using off line advertising than it is to struggle through the shifting sands of on line techniques. This fact points to an interesting dilemma about the means customers use to stay connected with companies doing business on the internet. If they can get to your site when they want what you have to offer, the strength of your information and services will provide the sales, but getting them there is a convoluted, hard to manage, and expensive process in itself. There may be millions of people cruising the internet 24 hours a day, but it does you no good at all if they are all looking somewhere else for what you have to give.

Using my own perspective on traditional and new marketing techniques, I started thinking about ways to reduce the distraction and expense of using mass media, capture the benefits of promotional items, stay connected with existing customers, provide a means to capture new business, and overcome some of the problems associated with connecting customers to internet based business information. The new approach also had to incorporate techniques that would be appealing for people to use without annoying them with unwanted information explosions.

The solution I devised from these objectives came in the form of several different iterations of desktop software applications. These programs start by providing users with appealing utility, that keeps them engaged with using the product. Much like a promotional item, people like getting free software, and are significantly more likely to try a new program than they are to read a direct mail letter. Even if they eventually lose interest in the program