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Selling handmade cards - promoting your Cards
This is a very cheap and effective way to promote your products.
First find some trade magazines that relate to your product, i.e.
Greetings today
or Progressive
Greetings as regards greeting cards , give them a ring and
ask for a sample copy, they may or may not send you a free copy.
Take a look at the new products/innovations pages,
you'll normally find between two and five pages of new products
with four or five pictures on each page, each product getting
a picture and short write up about how wonderful and exciting
it is!
I'll give you one guess where all those new products came from,
yep! you got it, people like you and me, you get to send a picture
of your product with your own description and it gets featured!
Now this could be a service offered by the magazine out of the
goodness of their hearts, but I believe the real reason is that
A. It makes an editors life very easy, B. It fills
pages of what would be a very thin magazine and C. it costs
the publisher nothing apart from some ink and paper.
Most trade magazines have a hard time filling pages, just look
at the industry news sections, so and so has taken over as director
of such and such company, so and so is pregnant!! Yes I have even
seen pregnancy announcements, if your product or announcement
is even half newsworthy they'll print it!
This is how it's done
Take one or two of your designs/products, you can either send
photos of the product, or better still send the real thing.
Write a sort descriptive paragraph describing the product, range
and price, bundle the whole lot up and send it to the respective
magazines.
Phone each magazine and find out who is in charge of the new
products section, then send your release directly to them, do
this with as many magazines as you can find.
Write a small cover letter telling the person dealing with that
magazine section that this is a new product/design just released.
Here's an example of a product release.
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nOObie Cards
Have just launched a new range of computer art cards.
Designed to appeal to computer nerds, they sport images
taken from computer screens such as the download bar,
the dreaded blue screen of death! and many other amusing
computer related images.
The range consists of twenty four designs covering
all the popular occasions, priced at just £1.25
RRP
Contact 01268 569420
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And that's all there is to it, sounds too simple? give it a go,
see what happens!
Using Press releases
Make sure the information is newsworthy.
Tell the audience that the information is intended for them and
why they should continue to read it.
Start with a brief description of the news, then distinguish who
announced it, and not the other way around.
Make sure the first 10 words of your release are effective, as
they are the most important.
Avoid excessive use of adjectives and fancy language.
Deal with the facts.
Provide as much contact information as possible: Individual to
contact, address, phone, fax, Email, Web site address.
Make sure you wait until you have something with enough substance
to issue a release.
Make it as easy as possible for media representatives.
How to set out a Press release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: This should appear in the upper
left, just under your letterhead. You should capitalise every
letter.
Contact Information: Skip a line or two after release statement
and list the name, title, telephone and fax numbers of your company.
Also give your home number since reporters often work on deadlines
and may not be available until after hours.
Headline: Skip two lines after your contact information
and use a boldface type.
Dateline: This should be the city your press release is
issued from and the date you are mailing your release.
Lead Paragraph: The first paragraph needs to grasp the
readers attention and should contain the relevant information.
Text: The main body of your press release where your message
should be.
Recap: At the lower left hand corner of your last page
restate your product specifications, highlight a product release
date.
Most Important:
Find out the name of the particular person from each publication
that is associated with your kind of product, Then fax this to
each of your chosen publications marking for the attention of
that person.
What happens if it doesn't work
If you fail to get published don't despair, there are many reasons,
it could be that you have missed the deadline for publication, the
magazine in question has had too many other submissions and has
no space left, or they simply did not like your work.
The secret is to keep trying, send something every month, find out
the deadlines for submissions and just keep going.
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