Sound the trumpets, summer is here and it's time for me to start getting back in shape.  My girlfriend, Lacey, and I have decided to start more of a healthy lifestyle.  I think people that work as hard as I do are a bit more susceptible to working too much and letting other parts of their lives take a backseat.  Whether that be by eating out too much, snacking too much, pushing working out off the schedule, not spending enough time with friends/family/etc - it can happen.  Keeping a balanced life makes things a lot better even if you aren't going around buying Teslas doesn't mean you don't have to be balanced.

As many of you may have read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People or maybe even THE BALANCED LIFE it's super important to make sure everything is in check.  I am a super-workaholic and if given the chance I will work hours upon hours without stop, showering, etc.  It's just not the best life you can live.  If you haven't picked up the books above I think it's a good start.

I want to give a shout out to a few things/people I do and/or follow.

• Jason Calacanis - he may be a bit more on the super-assertive side (some may even say abrasive) but people like this always speak their mind and sometimes it's very intriguing.  I also follow him on twitter he's always saying something.  I am a learner of the world and Jason has been (very) successful online and since I believe that you can learn valuable information from nearly everyone on the planet Jason is a good source.
• Techcrunch - Michael and Co. do so awesome at tracking online ventures that I would say they are second to none infact I don't know another site that even comes close to the indepth, quick and reliable coverage of online business day-in-and-day-out.  If you don't already subscribe to the feed you are behind.
• Griffin's Twitter (me) - I put this up here for fun mostly but it can't hurt to hear whatever I have to say right?  hah  I can't stand Myspace/Facebook anymore so it's my preferred method of contact - that is if you don't have my cell.

More important matters to come.  Stay tuned.  //g

Being home alone with the puppy this week has already proven to be very productive.  Not only have I automated some of the sites I do on the side - personally that once need a manual touch weekly, but I have given this blog a bit more of (much needed) love.

I have reworked the Akismet integration which has wasn't difficult at all infact it really does help and you don't even have to be using wordpress or the like to use it (as this whole blog is custom coded)

I have added twitter integration as well.  There truly isn't much crazy to report there.  Their API is super-simple and took all of like 10 minutes to do.  In fact, it took longer to style it into the page than the actual functionality.

Updated a few other little things on the backend, but basically this is a simply written blog software not many bells and whistles.

On a side note, kind of bummed Yahoo! and their board are completely stupid letting Microsoft walk away.  It will be fun however to see the stock tank Monday morning.

At any rate, more to come from me in the coming day.  Hope your weekend is going well. //g

The excitement is building in my office for a new venture I have invested time and money into.  The project is an Ecommerce store and this time my company is handling everything from the planning, development and marketing/deployment.  This will be the first foray into doing all steps on our own.  Usually I am the consultant that gets to come in and tell them the steps to make money then I get paid and get to go on with my life.

Don't get me wrong I like that arrangement and I make a sweet change doing it, but I finally moved to the point where I am not sick of making my clients money (it was/is my job) but I was wondering why I wasn't making myself all that money.  I know it's something that lots of web developers I've either hired or just know wish they could do and by that I mean get out of the vicious circle of dealing with the bread and butter (or clients).

So that will be my attempt, in my own way, to describe the steps my company has taken to ensure that our investment is solid.  I look forward to sharing with you some of my secrets and/or business practices.  //g

So I have left this "relatively" empty for the past several months.  You must forgive me as I was working through losing what I thought would be a partner to homesickness :)  Not everyone is set on leaving a home with a lack of opportunity for a place of plenty.  Now that everything is seemingly planned I should return to this blog and give it some TLC by actually filling in the (many) empty holes that exist.

A good place to get updates on what I am doing is by peeping griffingranberg on twitter.  More updates to come.  //g 

I get asked a lot of questions about this and that from all sorts of people.  We have been doing a lot of work with Restaurants in Fort Collins and we've talked about radio advertising, print advertising, tv advertising, and direct mail.  As many know the company I run does offer low cost printing solutions and a lot of the time this is when Coupons come up.

 My thought process on coupons is they are no good unless you go all out.  What I mean by that is that most people that clip coupons will clip them no matter what.  The big goal of coupons is to get people that do not normally give two thoughts to coupons to look, read, keep and use them with your company. 

I am one those people.  I am constantly inundated with coupons for hosting, domains, mailing services, restaurants, quick lubes, and all sorts of other things.  Without much more fluff, MAKE THE COUPON COUNT.  You already decided to waste a natural resource in order to help (hopefully) drive customers to your business.  In order to do that don't give "Buy 1 get 1 Half Off" if your product is only $2 each to begin with.  I'm really not impressed with your $1.00 off.  Then again maybe your product is $50+ or something and then MAYBE I'd be moved a bit more.

One of the restaurants we are working with in Fort Collins is a pizza joint.  They normally do something "safe" with their coupons where it's a decent deal but it isn't earth shattering.  Don't get me wrong it's not a horrible thing to do, but it isn't turning a lot of heads.  So when we went to do a Flyer w/ coupons for them to be distributed at CSU (Colorado State) we knew we wanted to really get people's attention.  We ended up doing a "2 Slices + Drink for 5 Bucks".  Each slice is normally around $3 and add another $1 or so for a drink.  So for a meal that normally would set someone back a touch over $7.00.  So the deal saves them a few bucks gives the impression that it's a low amount of money and easily spendable on this deal (I mean $5 for a meal?  You can't really even get that at McDonalds anymore).

So in conclusion, MAKE THE COUPON COUNT.  Do something crazy and I mean really crazy.  Think of what's crazy and then go a step further.  Coupons are a great way to introduce new consumers to your business but you have to give them a stiff push and a crazy/insane coupon can do it.  It's old school but it works.

It did for the pizza joint.  They saw great returns on it and brought a lot of new customers in that now have the possibility to becoming regular customers (more than they did without coming in anyway).