June 30, 2010

Personal Note for June 2010

I usually have so much on my mind I just don’t know where to start. I know business has been very busy and balance between work and family has had its challenges. The nice thing about it is that AMRCON has been growing at a steady pace that allows for additional qualified employees to make AMRCON even better. So I’m going to try and leave the business end of the blog at that. We’re very blessed and doing very well. A Thanks to all of our loyal clients.

After all of the excitement of the past few months the family had the chance to get away for a spell to the family house upstate. Funny, while we were there we found some familiar characters in the photo to the right. Does anyone recognize these notorious gangsters? OK, so maybe not all of us are notorious gangsters but the 2 little ones are for sure! We try and do it all up there, and it was funny that the last time we had done one of these pictures we only had Santino, so we had to get an updated photo. The extended weekend was mostly spent in the Lake George area, Water Slide World, the family house on the Hudson River and some stops here and in-between. I can honestly say I only opened up my laptop twice, and I think once was just to look something up locally. Can someone tell me if learning how to relax just comes with age? I’ll tell ya it’s been getting easier, but it’s so stressful for the years you try and figure out how to unstress! Doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Regardless, I’d like to hear from anyone that can tell me if and when they noticed things just got less stressful: was it at a certain age, monetary goal success, moving, children, marriage, promotion? What was it, or maybe it hasn’t happened?

More trips to come. If any of you want to share your thoughts in the blog, please feel free. I’ve also started a mission on Twitter “DeeRudko” and you probably all know how to find me on Facebook “Dee Rudko”. A new fun little application is Foursquare. It’s an application that allows you to check into locations as you move through your day, it also links back to Twitter and Facebook. Check it out. I’ve been playing a bit of a game with a few of my friends to see who can score the most check in points. So far Cliff has us all beat, but I’m trying to catch up. Check it out and search for me. If you haven’t started in social media, you should. The business opportunities are endless. The personal aspects are fun. I found people I haven’t talk to since grade school. Funny thing is I started networking with them in business as well. Funny, some of us were fighting on the playground, now we’re passing business referrals. Who would have thought?

September 2, 2009

AMRCON’s New Blog Website!

Welcome to AMRCON’s new Newsletter and content website. We’ve been working pretty hard to get this out and convert our monthly newsletter from paper, to email, to this. We have 1000′s of followers that we need to make sure sign up at the top right to subscribe to the monthly newsletter. We will be sending the courtesy email as usual for the next few months just as a reminder, but after that you will need to be signed up here to receive it. We would love for you to continue receiving our news. Soon we will also be introducing the RSS feed for those of you looking to receive your news in that method, along with integration into FaceBook and other media sites. Be sure to search for Dee Rudko and the group AMRCON on FB to follow us closer. Thank you for your continued support.

So here is a little tidbit I’d like to share with you, that you might be able to use in your own business. This will tell you a bit about where our newsletter started and why we’re here now. I think you’ll find it informative and you might just start thinking about how you want to use digital media, content and social networking to promote your business.

We started our monthly newsletter in January of 2007 in printed form. We began by just sending to our existing clients and current prospects. All of the same categories have survived since the beginning, including the Personal note. Believe it or not 30% of our feedback comes from sharing a little about myself and my family. Each month it became quite a task and expense to produce and deliver the newsletter, but we kept on going. The responses as well as comments from prospect clients was tremendous. Over the last few years we’ve gone through various changes as a company and it’s been reflective in the newsletter. Most of the same content writers are still in place, Adam and myself included.

In the meantime we developed several versions of our corporate website. It seemed each year we made such changes that we were redeveloping the entire site for a feature here and there. I realized through my endeavors of working with SEO/SEM (Search Engine Optimizations & Search Engine Marketing) efforts that we need a living breathing website to really stay in touch and be successful with our campaigns. So the idea to implement a blog based site began but where do we start. Well the next natural thought was we needed content to stay fresh in order to place better in the search engines. But where were we going to get content and who was going to update it? Of course the job inevitably would fall in my lap by default, but the thought crossed my mind. Why don’t we really hit the ball out of the park and maintain the content through our already popular newsletter? We can integrate all of the product aspects of the old site but bring new life through changing content and interaction with our clients at the same time. It just seemed like a win win. So we hit the paper with our development staff and sales group to start discussing this project.

It all fell together quite well. In fact the new site helped our process become more automated and easier to publish. Our sales staff could edit content prior to publishing or making publicly available. Now get this, even after our time and project expenses, the site will pay for itself in 4 months in savings. Some of the other added benefits include searchable content for historical information as well as search engines, which will help us rank better. So here we are in the infancy stages again of something that started back in 2007. I know we’re all very excited to see the growth not only in our business but also this newsletter. Soon we will have the rest of the pieces from our old corporate website integrated, but the nice thing is it will be interactive and constantly changing. Bringing you the updated content you need about products and services.

So don’t forget to join us by subscribing at the top right of this page, look for our RSS feed coming soon and be sure to search for Dee Rudko on FaceBook as well as the AMRCON group. We look forward to serving our valuable followers. Thank you!