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I remember being stunned a year or two ago when speaking to a friend. She was showing me her new business cards and I asked her (politely!) how much she paid for them. She hesitated before answering, and finally said “er, well, they came with some mini-brochures. About £250…”
You whaaaaat? £250 for a couple of hundred business cards and some A5-sized bits of paper? Are you joking?
It blew my mind how much she’d splurged on her marketing materials, but then I realised that’s probably the going price. What a rip-off, though! Why should small businesses have to pay these prices for essential stuff? It’s madness.
I’m a bit biased, because the company I use to print my stuff is so cheap. They’re called VistaPrint and the one caveat I have before I recommend them to you is that they don’t do design work (well, they do now, according to their website, but I haven’t got any idea how good it is).
This is how it works: you design what you want done (business cards, promotional T-shirts, flyers, brochures, whatever), put it onto a file you can upload (so the file would need to be something like a gif, jpeg, png or tiff), then upload it to their website and hey-presto. Freeware design software is readily available on the Internet, so why not see what you can do? G’wan. I’ve even gone and done a Google search for you. What more do you want? Blood?
Don’t have enough confidence to design your own business card? Then don’t. Get someone else’s and model yours after what they have (changing, of course, your details and the name of your company!).
But why would you want to go and do that? Why go to all the trouble of designing something yourself and uploading it to a website printing company?
Here’s why: they’re good quality and incredibly cheap. Once you get onto their mailing list, you might find the constant email marketing a bit tiring (they are, ah, let’s say, “lively” marketers), but be tolerant. Every couple of months you’ll want to have something printed and their emails always have lots of juicy deals. Lots of free stuff, actually, where you literally only pay for the file upload and postage and get the materials you’re having printed for zero pounds.
My last batch of business cards? Cost about £6 for 250, including postage. They’ve got me for life.
Have a look at the site here. The link apparently includes a 25%-off deal, so go crazy, kids.
You’re very welcome to reprint any of the Good Business articles on your website and/or newsletters free of charge, provided:
Daniel O'Connor is a website copywriter, advertising copywriter and marketing copywriter using the name Daniboy. He can be contacted in the UK on +44-1892-518269 or at mail@daniboy.com. Visit http://www.daniboy.com for further details of his services, including bespoke article writing, and more free reprint articles.
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