RECENT DESIGN ACTIVITY

Make Residual Income from businesscard reprints.

You’ve probably heard enough of all those money making schemes “make money while you sleep”. You probably went to such seminars and got pumped up only to learn later how quickly your life went flat again. Such Schemes are well known, and you probably learned already not to get suckered in by these scams. The good-to-be-true offers are not true 99% of time.

Residual Income(also called Passive Income) is income earned on an ongoing basis for effort done once in the past. Another words, you bought chickens and they lay the eggs for you. Residual income idea is an old one and many people today use it to make money, especially on the internet. The same idea can be incorporated into your design business.

I would like to discuss with you how you can make residual income off of your business card reprint orders. Why not make extra cash since you design business cards already?

Where do you began?

There are literately 100’s of companies that print business cards for as cheap as $7, and they do a quality job too. You probably want to avoid your local printing company for this, as they are going to be pricey, unless, of course it is some special business card project which requires 6th color processing and/or impression where perfection is an absolute necessity. For this to work, price factor is important because you want to make at least 200% profit off the reprint orders. To determine how much you should be charging your customers, call your local printing companies and find out how much they charge say for 250 printed business cards. In my area companies charge around $45-60 for 250pcs.

Open an account with a printing firm which offers cheap business card printing. You can find many such firms by simply googling for them. Personally, I use gotprint.com. Sign up with a company which will allow you to:

• Open up a reseller account. (reseller account receive promotions and wholesale printing rates)
• Save your business card orders.
• Save your billing information
• Run a minimum of 100 piece orders (there are companies which do a minimum of 1000 cards, avoid those)
• Drop ship orders to your client’s door

Reordering your prints online is easy; you can do that from your reseller account with one click of a button. No time wasted resubmitting those orders to the printing shop, because your orders and billing information is safely stored at your reseller account.
Try not to overcharge your clients for the design and offer them a good price on printing, this will ensure that they will come back to you later. Never hand them the actual design unless they demand it, make them come back to you for reprint orders. Your goal is to make as much residual orders from your client as possible. Print small orders because that will enable your clients to come back to you more often.

I have one client to whom I suggested to use his business cards as appointment cards also. On the back of the business card I designed for him an appointment form which the he uses to write appointment dates for his clients. He loves the cards since they serve more than one purpose, and I love it because I get frequent reorders.

You will learn later that the residual income will help your company stay afloat, especially during the slow periods. It smooths out the down size sales curve. Even if you are a big design firm, the residual part of business shouldn’t be disregarded just because you have contracts with huge companies; contacts don’t last forever.

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