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.

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.

The "Kick Me" sign concept draws on the same impacing power as the flyer printing and distribution strategies listed here. BONUS: You can get your own "Kick Me" sign here.

Flyer printing is perfect for marketing to the masses, yet it still allows you to control your targeting. Everyone who has studied marketing will tell you that you have to get attention first, and so you have to have a compelling image, a powerful headline and on and on.

Spare me the Marketing 101 lesson, right?

The best way to guarantee your flyers will get noticed is to focus on placement, and the more shocking the better. People remember the unexpected; it catches them off-guard and forces their brains to recognize, analyze and remember. Isn’t this exactly what your flyers should be doing for you?

So let’s establish that flyer placement is just as important as flyer printing in the first place. Let’s also acknowledge that shocking your audience with creative placement will be far more effective than, say, tacking your flyer to a community bulletin board (where everyone is competing for attention). Additionally consider that sometimes context and placement work together to make a flyer shocking. For example, a flyer inside a grocery store is not shocking. A PETA flyer inside a grocery store, on the other hand, has the potential to be rather shocking indeed.

Thus, here are my five favorite shocking places to post flyers:

1. Restroom stalls – Shock your target audience by giving them something to read while they’re taking care of business.

2. Ceilings – Anywhere your customers are forced to look up is a great place to catch them off-guard. Good examples include the ceilings in dentist and chiropractor examination rooms, and you can also pull this off in hair salons and in tandem with a wall-based flyer that says “Look up!”

3. Inside books – Work out an arrangement with a bookstore or library to stuff targeted books with flyers. Imagine your customers’ surprise when they flip open to your “page”!

4. Coat racks – Coat racks are perfect for a “what’s this?” moment between you and your customers.

5. On people – Remember the “kick me” signs of our youth? We’ve been compelled to read anything taped to another’s back ever since.

Image use via Riding A Buttertub

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Online. This is among the most popular forms of portfolio design. It’s easy to access by anyone with the Internet, and it shows that in addition to creating all the lovely projects in your portfolio, you can also create a user-friendly, attractive website. One tip is to let your work shine through – don’t go too crazy with the bells and whistles on the website at the risk of crowding your portfolio pieces.

Brochure. This is old school. A brochure is something you can physically hand to potential clients. It’s a shiny, classy way to be sure your work detail shows up. A brochure is a good choice – in addition to an online portfolio – for more artsy pieces, as creativity can sometimes get lost when it’s pixilated.

Booklet. A cheaper alternative to a brochure is a booklet. Freelance illustrator Steve Harpster recently ordered a batch of booklet portfolios after marketing attempts with postcards and directory listings. The booklets contain 30 of his images as well as his variety of styles. They’re much less expensive to ship to prospects than brochures.

PDF. Less expensive to produce than a website is a PDF. Despite the grumblings in the past, most potential clients will have a PDF reader on their computer, and they can easily open up your work and see it intact. A layered PDF allows the viewer to flip through multiple pieces of your work, and you can create buttons and links.

Business card. For a bonus way to market yourself, use up that real estate on your business card. Create fold-out business cards and include thumbnails of your best portfolio work. Be sure to include how to get access to the rest of your portfolio.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

You might be wondering how free bookmarks can grow your business. Let me illuminate: distributing relevant bookmarks to your target audience (assuming, of course, that your target audience reads) lets you brand your company and pitch your products and services every time your customers sit down to read.

Let’s look at a hypothetical real-world example. A T-shirt company makes shirts in a macabre style, and their research has indicated that a majority of their customers read horror novels written by the likes of Stephen King, Dean Koontz and John Saul. The company decides to print bookmarks based on similar themes.

The bookmarks might include a list of the top 10 must-read horror novels, or they might depict images of werewolves, ghosts and psychotic lunatics. Perhaps they’ll draw from a long-dead author whose work is in the public domain, such as Edgar Allan Poe, for macabre poetry reproduction. No matter what they use, we can say that the bookmarks are designed in a vein that the T-shirt company’s customers will appreciate.

On the back of the bookmarks, the company features some of its top-selling products and offers a discount coupon code for online or phone ordering. Then it partners with bookstores, libraries, book clubs, and online book distributors to have them include a free bookmark with every King, Koontz, and Saul purchase, rental, borrow and order.

The customers get a free bookmark they’ll use because it is relevant to their tastes, and they get to discover a great product line they’ll love. Profits from the campaign (tracked via the coupon codes) are shared between partners, so everyone wins!

Image use Creative Commons license via Flickr.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

In order to get your blog started, you want to do the following:

Find a blog host

There are tons of places that offer free blog pages. Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, Blogspot.com, Typepad.com, Thoughts.com, Sosblog.com, Okblog.net, Soulcast.com and Aeonity.com are just a few of the hundreds of places where you can host a blog for free. Most of the hosts have sites that are very easy to navigate, and you can quickly set up your blog space. With customized templates and the ability to alter HTML code (for most blog sites), you can quickly make the blog unique to your style.

You’ll also get to have a customized URL for your blog. Most likely, your URL will include the domain of the blog host for example myblog.blogspot.com. Another option for a more personalized blog domain is to shell out about $10 and purchase a domain name. After doing so, you can forward your domain and point to your blog, so that when people type in your specific domain, ex: www.myblog.com, it will automatically direct them to your free blog site.

Decide on content

When creating a blog, you want to make sure that your content is focused. Pick an area that you’d like to center on and stick to it. If your blog is going to be about graphic design, great! But as a graphic design blog, all of your topics should have some aspect of graphic design about them. A resource for graphic designers, the everyday life of graphic designers, challenges that graphic designers face, graphic design jobs, portfolio work, design program tips and tricks are all things that center around graphic design. Celebrity favorites, what you ate for dinner last night and your party spots for the weekend would not be topic centric for a professional graphic design blog.

Don’t get me wrong, personal blogs can encompass everything that you’re thinking and experience, but a successful professional graphic design blog should showcase you as an expert in the design world. Getting too personal could hurt more than help.

In order to maintain your blog, you want to do the following:

Invite others to read and subscribe

What other designers and advertisers are looking for is a strong following of your blog. To do that, you’ll want to invite everyone that you can get your hands on. Follow other design blogs and post links to your blog in your profile and your comments. Use your social media sites to promote your blog; Facebook and LinkedIn are great ways to do this. Also, any professional association that you’re a part of should be posted your blog. Use your own personal website to promote your blog as well. Use keywords and tags in your posts that are related to design searches such as “design tutorials” or “graphic design jobs”. These tags will allow your blog to come up on search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing when people use those words in their searches.

Keep people coming back to your blog

Advertisers want to know if and how many people are reading, commenting and subscribing to your blog. The best way to get people to stay on your site is to make it interactive. What is the average designer looking for on a design blog? What would you look for? Design work, tutorials, continuing education resources and resume tips are just several of the hot topics that designers read up on every day. Make it known that you want people to comment and leave messages. Ask your audience what they feel is an important issue in the design world right now. Highlight graphic designers that are doing good quality work. Encourage designers to submit their best designs and hold a contest where subscribers can vote on who they think is the best. These aspects will keep your audience coming back.

©2010 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.