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An interesting way to market your site
I'm sure none of you know this about me, but I'm coming out of the closet to tell you all that I'm a geek.
I have been most of my life.
How does this relate to IndexU and marketing? Well since I'm a geek, but I'm also pretty busy, I take one weekend a year and go to a science fiction convention. It's one weekend that I take off every year and spend the weekend there in the hotel.
So each year I've seen some interesting things, and right on a table beside the line up for registration people can place flyers and notices and bookmarks so people can pick them up.
So this gave me an idea! Since I'm going anyways, why not get some bookmarks printed up and put them out for free? I want to promote one of my new sites which is webcomicguide.com.
So I found out the "standard" sizes for bookmarks and found a PSD template for them too. I then designed a simple but nice looking bookmark using photoshop and a comicbook type font. Overall this took me about an hour as I changed things, moved them, reworded them etc.
Then I checked online and bookmarks are relatively cheap to have printed. I was looking at about $70US to have 300 of them printed. But I'm also cheap, so I went to a local printer and asked for a better price.
Here's what I got.
The printer told me they could print them on an 11x17 sheet of glossy paper and have the bookmarks side by side and a few down the edge if we resized them a little smaller. I asked for a price and was told it was going to be $0.63 (one sided, I could pay $0.48 extra for both sides) per page INCLUDING cutting!
Wait.
$0.63 per page, and if they did the resizing correctly, they should be able to get 12 on a page.
So 300 of them would cost me $15.75!
I promptly order 50 sheets which should give me 600 bookmarks and the grand total is $31.50 plus tax.
But wait it gets better.
Technically now that I'm paying for advertising I can write that cost off on my income tax. But since I'm also advertising my site at an event, the event becomes tax deductable as well (subject to limits etc). This will end up saving me more money in taxes than it's going to cost.
Since it's such a cheap way to promote, I figure anyone could do this. Heck you could even go out to ANY type of event related to your website and advertise this way. Or you could partner with another company and SELL them advertising on the back of your own bookmark anddistribute them at an event.
Sell them for $0.10 each. Not much you say? Well they would need to buy a minimum of lets say 500. So 500 at $0.10 is $50 (cheap advertising comparatively). What does it cost you for 500 bookmarks (2 sided)? $46.25! Now you printed 500 bookmarks to advertise your own company and made a profit of almost $4. Charge $0.12 and you're making $14.00 and getting free advertising. I'm sure you could charge more than $0.12 but you get my point, it's cheap!
As a note, if your "partner" needed the image done for them you could easily charge $50-100 for that and give them the image when you're done so they can do it again.
By the way, in regards to any possible tax benefits please speak to a tax accountant before assuming you can write off ANYTHING.
You can see a copy of the bookmark on the attachment below. It will end up being about 6" x 1.75" which means it will also fit in a pocketbook too. Since the URL is on both ends, the bookmark owner will see the URL no matter which way they put it in! Gotcha!
This concludes my latest idea in marketing and advertising. It wasn't difficult at all and my bookmarks are ready to be picked up tomorrow all nicely shrinkwrapped to keep them clean until I put them on the table.
I hope you enjoy my idea and get some inspiration from it.
