People will want to have something to put up on the fridge at home. Including a photo of the baby is an added bonus, allowing friends and family to show off the new arrival.

Whether your expecting, or your designing a baby announcement on behalf of a client or friend, there are tons of formats and design choices that can make your birth announcement a hit! To get started in brainstorming for your custom birth announcement, check out the tips below:

1. Choose and elegant format
For those folks who want to send out a classic birth announcement, greeting card and envelope formats are an elegant choice. Choose a matte paper stock and a script font for a traditional look and feel. For the outer envelope, select clear mailing labels that will blend in nicely to address the announcements to friends and family.

2. Include a custom stamp
Even the stamp you use to mail a birth announcement can be cute and baby themed. The US Postal Service offers custom stamps through its online store, shop.usps.com There are stamps with flowers, Disney characters, hearts and wildlife mothers caring for their young. There’s even customized-postage software available for purchase, so you can put the baby’s face on the stamp!

3. Personalize with photos
If you’d like to use a postcard format for birth announcements, then put a photograph of the new baby on the front of the card, and information on the back. Don’t limit the photo choices to the baby alone. Pictures of the baby with his or her parents, grandparents or the baby and a sibling are all excellent choices for the front of the postcard. Humorous photos, such as the new child of two doctors wearing a stethoscope, can be a fun way to introduce the newest member of the family. If you are doing a greeting-card format, you can insert baby photos into the envelopes for your entire list or to a select number of family and friends.

4. Design around the new name
Whenever a new baby is born, the first thing most folks ask about is the name. The baby’s initials or name are a great design element to use in the printed birth announcement. If the format is a greeting card, try using the first, middle and last names in a classic monogram, centered on the front of the card and on the back flap of the envelope as well. Adding a foil-stamp treatment to the monogram is another nice touch. The letters in a monogram are organized first name, last name, middle name, so a child named “Adam James Livingston” would be, “ALJ.” Another cute idea is to repeat the baby’s first name in either a blue or pink font (depending on the gender) as a border around the announcement.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

A major part of being legitimate is registering your business name with the state. This is important for filing your taxes, going into contractual agreements and starting bank accounts. Think about your business in the long term. You might one day acquire employees, which means creating a payroll. You could one day rent or own an office space. Whatever you do with your business, your business name is going to be involved somehow. Making sure that it is officially listed as a registered business with your Secretary of State’s office is a necessary step toward being a legitimate business owner.

The first step is to go to your Secretary of State’s office. A quick Google search will direct you to their website. I live in Ohio, so I would do a Google search for “Ohio Secretary of State”. After finding the website, you want to look for the section of the site that focuses on businesses. A business filing or name registration tab is normally on the home page. During the process, you’ll be able to do a search for your business name to see if anyone else is using the name you’ve chosen. This is why it’s important to do this step before purchasing those business cards!

After verifying that no other business has your name, you want to fill out a registration form. Remember, just because the name you’ve chosen doesn’t come up (or does come up) doesn’t mean that it’s available (or not available). There are regulations on having a business name, but if someone’s chosen the same name in a different industry, it may still be available for you. The same goes for a business name showing as available. Someone might be in the process of registering the same name in the same industry, so filling out the form and applying is the only way to know if the name you’ve chosen can be registered by you.

The form is normally one that you’ll have to print off and mail back to your Secretary of State. It involves signatures and a filing fee. The fee for Ohio is $125, but you should check your specific state to see how much they charge. If your application is approved, you will receive a certificate showing your official registration with your state. Your Secretary of State’s office will also notify you if there is a problem with your application, or if your business name is not available.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve always believed in karma more than luck – I follow the simple Buddhist theory that if I’m a good person, good things will happen to me. Indeed, there’s a belief that good luck is something people create for themselves by being optimists, therefore creating their own fortune.

A lot of PsPrint customers are freelancers or are employed by small businesses, so we’re all aware of how cutthroat competition can be. But in order to survive and even grow your company, you need more than luck – you need gumption and drive. You need to make the effort by developing a solid marketing plan. Rather than pout that you lost another customer to your nemesis, think about why that happened. Was it bad luck, or did you not offer a good-enough value to the prospect?

Going back to karma – it really is a beneficial practice to consider for your business. Join groups, clubs and charitable organizations. Network. Make referrals. All of those things help your community as well as get your name out there. People will remember you when it comes time to making a business decision. The cliché “what goes around comes around” is true, as luck would have it.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

While it is true that the mail-order business witnessed a 3.4 percent decrease in 2009, it really isn’t clear whether that is a permanent trend or more the result of an economic repression that has hurt just about every other business on the planet.

What’s more, catalog printing accounted for more than $133 billion in sales last year. Hardly what you’d call a dead industry, eh?

There are certain trends that you should pay attention to if you market with catalog printing. The most successful companies in the Internet-age have mailed specific niche catalogs. They’ve learned that the more in-tune you are with your customers, the better your sales figures will be. Mass-market catalogs are giving way to specialty-niche catalogs, and even the big chains are breaking their formally large catalogs down into smaller, niche-oriented catalogs.

Catalog printing can reach a target audience that can be difficult to engage online, and your marketing campaigns will work best when your catalog printing and online e-commerce store work together. Catalogs can get you the attention you need and give a healthy sampling of what you sell, then lead customers to your website to buy additional items as needed.

Catalog printing is growing, especially for the niche companies I mentioned earlier. Outer Banks, for example, has more than tripled its customer base in just three years, a 309 percent increase. And that’s not the only mail-order catalog enjoying phenomenal growth!

Catalog printing isn’t dead, but it is fair to say that the catalog’s role in the purchasing process changed. Take advantage of these changes and you can print a powerful catalog that brings in massive return on investment.

Image use Creative Commons license via Flickr.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

In honor of St. Paddy’s day, I want to give a shout-out to my local liquor store. This is not just a gratuitous plug for alchohol, my local liquor store is actually behind one of the best flyer printing campaigns that I’ve seen in a while.

I frequent this liquor store because it’s close to my house and has an immense beer selection and a make-your-own six pack policy, so that customers can sample many different kinds of beer at once.

The store is owned by a guy named Mark, who I feel like I know. The reason I know Mark’s name, and talk about him like he’s a friend of mine, is because of the flyer that his cashiers hand over with every purchase.

The flyer is a simple double-sided 8.5-inch by 11-inch paper that acts as a newsletter of sorts. It is written by Mark and advertises for the store itself, recommending great wines under $10 dollars, or different sales throughout the week, like the 10 percent off liquor on “Thirsty Thursdays.”

But Mark goes beyond plugging his own merchandise and includes recommendations for other local businesses. For example, he recently purchased a new grill at a mom-and-pop barbecue supply store. He wrote up his experience at the store in the flyer and even let folks know to “ask for Bill.” This information makes me feel like an neighborhood “insider,” and I want to pass along all of these tips to other neighbors and friends.

Somehow there’s always something noteworthy or relevant to me in the liquor store flyer, and when I come home with my six-pack, I always post the flyer on the fridge. The flyer acts as a sort of newsletter, communicating with customers and supporting other small, independent businesses with word-of-mouth referrals.

Flyers are an inexpensive way to better communicate with your customers and show how your business is integrated with the community and its customers. They can be distributed at the cash register, through the mail or in person. And with only two pages (front and back) to fill, it is relatively easy to come up with content weekly, monthly or even quarterly, depending how frequently you interact with customers.

Talk to your print vendor about the unique die-cut shapes, paper colors and other printing options to design your own flyer and make it a success!

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Blogging is easy because your subject matter comes from your own education and experience. As a graphic artist your everyday business life is the inspiration for your writing. If you constantly design flyers and rack cards, you can blog about rack card printing tips or places that offer deals on printing flyers. If you grew your client base through networking, you can blog about events that you’ve attended to build your network base or topics on how to strike up conversations and promote your services upon just meeting a potential client.

Here are five great websites that pay designers for blog posts. Most of them pay per post after an approval of your post by their staff. It’s a great way to make some extra money and promote your business at the same time!

• Design Reviver.com
• SmashingMagazine.com
• ProBlogdesign.com
• CrazyLeafdesign.com
• Gomediazine.com

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.