Free Toolsday for April 15th
Tuesday
Apr 15, 2008
Happy tax day! Here’s a great free tool to save yourself some green. Honestly, I’m not sure why it’s taken me SO long to tell you about this tool. Anyone who’s ever had to hire a graphic designer for a really simple postcard or business card knows how frustrating it can be to put so much back & forth into a project that takes the designer 10 minutes to flesh out. Not to mention how much money it costs. This is why PsPrint launched the fabulous Design It! tool last year.
Design It! uses state of the art online graphic technologies that allow you to design a business card or postcard in mere minutes. It’s super easy to do the design work and ordering online. With the tool you can either upload your own background or photograph or pick from hundreds of stock designs that PsPrint’s internal graphic design team have developed since the launch of this tool.
You may be weary to use it since it it’s provided by a printing company, but there’s no obligation to buy. At no time do you put in your name or email address or anything unless you decide to order. So you don’t have to worry about receiving junk mail or anything after just giving it a try.
All text boxes are very intuitive to use when adding your custom text, and you can change fonts, colors, and customize the photos or logos you use on the cards. When designing postcards you can even add your own indicia to mail the cards professionally. At last count there are over 300 different templates for the business cards and over 150 templates for the postcards. PsPrint even has an open invitation to users to submit their feedback about what templates they’d like to see and what would improve the system.
Give it a try today. You have nothing to lose!
FeedBurner FAIL
Sunday
Apr 13, 2008
Something wonky happened a few days ago and I didn’t notice… sorry feed readers!
Here’s the posts you may have missed…
Where Online Meets Offline
Wednesday
Mar 26, 2008
I should talk about this topic more, but online is just SO fascinating and I’ve been immersed in off line for the last 4 years so it’s routine to me. Since we discontinued our old poorly performing affiliate program at the beginning of February, I’ve been focused on growing our new Reseller Program and much more improved Affiliate Program. We decided, as I’m sure we’re legally bound, to pay out all pending commissions, regardless of whether or not they met our minimum threshold. This meant 400+ checks being processed by accounting, then printed, then signed, then put into envelopes, then posted, then actually put into the mail. This took about a month to get through the internal systems and the checks were sent out a couple weeks ago.
Since many of our affiliates in the old program had long abandoned the program, a lot of checks are coming back unable to be delivered. I’ve been contacting people and resending the checks as I get new addresses, and with every check I’m resending I’ve been throwing in one of my business cards. I realize today that this is the epitome of online marketing (affiliate payments) meets off line marketing (business cards).
It just goes to show that you can’t keep exclusively to one medium or another. There’s such a vast audience out there for your product or service – and they’re not all going to be able to be found in one place. It’s important – maybe now more than ever – to integrate your direct mail marketing with landing page testing. Put your produced commercials for television onto the web and get a piece of the viral marketing cookie. Remember the old adage “don’t put all your eggs in once basket” and don’t put all your money into PPC or direct mailing.
Diversify your marketing efforts and remember that just because you’re an internet geek, not all your customers are.
