Free Internet Marketing Lessons

by Tom Falco

Even if you own an on-line business, it is important to promote your site off line as well.

Post cards are the best for this. They are the most inexpensive way to advertise and they are direct mail, which is a very highly recommended way to advertise your business or product.

Post cards are great for announcing new businesses or sales or new items or whatever you wish to promote at the moment.

They are easily managed and don't cost much to send. You can send as many or as little as you choose at any given time.

The great thing about post cards is that they can be targeted directly to whom you want to reach and they can be timed to reach them when you want to reach them.

Post cards are inexpensive. The best method is to print them on vellum stock. You can use regular pastel colors and order 67lb. vellum bristol stock or brighten up the cards by using neon colors or astrobrites, which are ordered in 65lb. cover and cost a little more.

To save money on neon or bright colors, you can use goldenrod, which is considered a standard color and is priced as such, but it is brighter than the usual standard colors and it costs the same.

You can of course use more than one ink color and even go full color if you choose. The choice is yours.

Post cards can be economically printed. You don't need to have the back printed. Just leave it blank and use that for the mailing label and stamp.

Have your message on one side.

There are two standard sizes: 4" x 6" and 4 1/4" x 5 1/2". It is important to stick to these sizes or the post office may send back the cards for more postage.

To save money on printing, have the post cards camera- ready for the printer. Print the same image "4-up". In other words, take an 8 1/2" x 11" sheet and place the same image four times. They will fit evenly, and when printed, you will have four on a sheet, which is then cut. If you print 100 sheets, you'll get 400 cards (4 1/4" x 5 1/2" each).

4" x 6" cards will not fit four on a sheet, they will fit three per sheet. But just the same, 100 sheets will yield 300 post cards.

At present the cost is 20 cents in the United States to send a standard post card. We have many readers from all across the world, and I apologize for not knowing the mailing rates of other countries, but I am sure they are just as inexpensive.

You can direct the mailings to potential customers in any area or field or zip code you choose.

If you are in the carpet cleaning business, you may want to concentrate on certain zip codes. If you sell school supplies, you would want to mail to schools. You can actually pick and choose who receives your mailings. In this way, you are truly targeting your message.

You can purchase mailing lists or make up your own. One way we have found is to use an on-line yellow pages and just copy and paste the addresses we need under any given category.

Make the headline stand out. This is what will grab your reader. If you are selling items for 50% off, let them know! Have "50% OFF!" as the main large headline. If you are selling houses, have the headline say something that will attract attention like: "MORTGAGES HAVE NEVER BEEN SO LOW!" or whatever. But grab their attention.

Depending on your message, you can usually expect a 1% to 4% return, which isn't bad. You would be lucky to get that response from your banner ads on line.

We have gotten many big clients with post cards. From one small post card, we once got a client worth $40,000 per year. This is no joke. We would print their booklets quarterly for years. The post card we sent on book printing caught their attention and we bid on the job and got it and kept the account for many years.

Another large client had kept our post card from a year before and called a year later and asked if we still printed books. We did, and we got the job.

Someone else called a year later asking to re-order a product they had ordered before. They had our pink post card in their hand when we showed up.

It is important to mail on a consistent basis and we'll get into that in another issue. But the best thing to do right now would be to start considering what you want to say on your post cards and try to design a nice card to print. Use any of the art or word programs on your computer and have fun.

Don't worry about being artistic. The message on the card is what is important. If you are going to save me 50% on something, I don't care if you are artistic or not!

It's a great way to introduce new websites. The big ad agencies do this all the time.


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Tom Falco is editor of XpectMore.com Marketing eZine you can subscribe by visiting: http://www.XpectMore.com or mailto:ezine@ xpectmore.com?subject=subscribe Tom also is Quiz Master of "American Pop Culture Trivia" Visit: http://www.xpectmore.com/pop.htm