One of the best and most effective kinds of promotional items is something that sits on the desk of your customer or client. Something on their desk puts your name and logo in front of their eyes throughout the entire workday, and when they need your goods and services, your contact information, including phone number and website, will be right at their fingertips.

One such promotional item for the desktop is a block pad. Block pads are thick squares of paper, made up of several hundred single strips of paper glued together on one side. They are most often used as scratch pads for jotting down telephone messages, to-do lists, email addresses, appointments, notes on telephone calls, and other miscellaneous bits of information that pass through a person's day.

Block pads are printed with your brand on the three sides that aren't glued. In that way the sides are each treated as one piece of paper, even though they are more properly several hundred pieces of paper. Your logo is visible even as the block gets smaller and smaller, page by page. This wearing down of hundreds of sheets, one by one, can take months, even years, and does not reduce the visibility of your brand or information. Just to be safe, it is advisable to make sure your contact information is listed clearly in the lower quarter of your block pad.

Paper block pads also come with some accessories to make them even nicer and more useful. You can get a small pallet or stand for your block pad to rest on. You can get a plastic or metal holder which also has your brand on it, and in some cases includes a pen and pencil holder.

Block pads come in a wide variety of sizes and other options. They don't have to be cubes; they can be rectangular, triangular, circular, or ovals as well. They can also be made in specialty shapes such as hearts, trucks, apples, stars, crosses, or almost anything your business requires. They can be lined or unlined, and have your name printed on each individual sheet or have each sheet left blank. They can be as small as an inch thick, or as thick as four to six inches thick. They can look like standard sized pads of paper. They can even come with adhesive strips across the back of each piece of paper, so they can be used as post-it notes. This is an even more useful option than regular pieces of scrap paper, because if your paper is stuck to their computer, phone, desktop, bulletin board or wall, your name is in multiple places, getting impressions from not only the person in possession of the block pad but everyone else in the vicinity.

Another benefit of block pads is that they can be, and frequently are, made of recycled paper. You can be assured that you are being ecologically responsible in your business practices, by buying and giving out recycled paper, and your customers can be assured of your commitment to the environment as well as to quality business practices.