One of best marketing strategies a business or organization can use is postcards. Even before arrival of online postcard printing and mailing services, postcards had a good reputation amongst guerilla marketers because:

*They are fast, easy and relatively cheap - making them a boon to small business owners who are short on cash and time, yet need to build their brand and stay in front of their customers. *A beautiful, full color glossy postcard is not going in trash without first being read. *You can add a personal note. Plus, postcards create a pleasant emotional response because they are usually received by friends and family. *When you advertise your business anywhere else, your competition knows it. But when you use postcards to communicate with your customers, it is direct to them and your competition will have no idea.

With new web technologies for postcards, it's super- convenient to just send one or as many as you need without effort of hand writing, addressing and mailing each one.

What is particularly nice about postcards is that nearly any business or organization can benefit from a structured, targeted postcard marketing strategy. Take a look at some of ways postcards can be used.

Thank you notes. You can send a quick thank you to anyone for any reason and they will be so surprised and pleased that you took time. If someone sends you a referral or business lead, gives you some information you needed, mentions you in an article - send them a note that shows you appreciate it!

A follow-up offer or service. Within 30 days after a purchase of a product or completion of a service, send them a discounted offer for a related service or product. Don't miss opportunity for an after-sale contact.

Gift certificates or coupons. Show your best customers that you appreciate them by sending a gift certificate that they can use any time in next year. Even better, leave a space on it for them to fill out a friend or colleagues name and give it to someone else to introduce them to your business.

The spy is known by a few names "spyware, adware, trojans". Whatever it’s called, what it does, once it's in your computer, is start taking statistical information as you travel Internet. It may also send you pop-up ads and slow down your computer. Wired.com, http://www.wired.com/news echnology/0,1282,49960,00.html, mentioned it "could even collect your credit card information". According to “OptOut”, http://grc.com/optout.htm, one spyware program attacks your e-mail signature file.

How did you invite spy?

Maybe you've gone to a website you knew and enjoyed only to find that it was purposefully purchased by a pornography site. The new company may have imbedded "spyware" or "adware" into that new home page and now, in many cases without your knowledge, it's on your computer, too.

Maybe you've downloaded a free or paid program and as part of package you were provided with an added bonus – a spyware program.

Maybe you agreed to it! You could have downloaded a program and checked box that allows that program to take statistics from you "for their own use".

What you can do?

A firewall program should let you know when you're on a website and a program is about to download. Note word "should".

Or you can learn all about spyware, download an anti-spyware program, and schedule time in your weekly calendar to run program. What I originally found on my 18-month-old computer were: 2 porn and 42 other spyware programs. A week later, I had 4 new spyware programs appear.