Jay Conrad Levinson once said, “Your website is the window of your business. Keep it fresh; keep it exciting.” When online visitors show up on your digital doorstep, the first impression you leave with them is critical. So ask yourself: what are your print buyers learning about your business when given the opportunity to peek through your online “window”? A website can make or break your business, which is why it needs to remain one of your top priorities. When you focus on meeting the needs of today’s print buyers and selling more printing, you’ll quickly understand these top five reasons why printers choose the websites at Marketing Ideas For Printers. 1. Exclusively FOR PRINTERS Studies indicate that 175 websites are created every minute. That’s a new website every three seconds! While numbers like these might paint the picture that websites are a dime a doze, that’s simply not the case. Your website needs to fit the unique needs of your business and industry, and it needs to mold the wants and needs of your print buyers. The websites at Marketing Ideas For Printers were built by printers for printers. Who better to help you navigate your online presence than
A great website can make all the difference for your print business. It can draw in potential print buyers, inspire, answer questions, and provide essential resources. Your website can be your greatest salesperson or a thorn in the side of your branding. Below are four websites, that in our opinion, excel in the area listed. Take a few minutes to take a peek and gather some insight, knowledge, and inspiration from printers doing their websites right. Ignite Printing in Brockville, Ontario: Branding Ignite Printing has a look all its own. A quick visit to this website and you’ll see “nice people; nice printing,” as their tagline says, but you’ll also see excellent branding. With a fun, groovy look, Ignite Printing knows how to make a great first impression. You’ll see evidence of this uniqueness in their website sliders, call-out boxes, their sidebar ads, and other areas throughout the site. If you’re looking for a new look and feel for your brand, Ignite Printing is the perfect website to gather up some inspiration. Supreme Graphics in Arcadia, Wisconsin: Testimonials Next on our list is Supreme Graphics. This website makes our list because they understand how to grow their business with testimonials
Good website design for your print company could mean the difference between getting an online order and being passed over for a competitor. But why? Isn’t a good website design like art? Isn’t it relative and dependent on the eye of the beholder? Not exactly. Your website design has to accomplish three critical things: Your website design should create a great, easy-to-use user experience. Your website design should translate competency. In other words, a good website design = a competent print business. Your website design should help to create trust in your print buyer. Here are seven best practices you can follow in your website design to help you get there: 1. Color Harmony While it’s true that you can print any color in the rainbow, it’s not necessarily a good idea to use them all on your website. Sensory overload can backfire and send people running to a more professional-looking printer. Let photo graphics provide the ‘full-color’ on your website, and keep your color palette simple and inspiring. “Good design is good business.” – Thomas Watson, Jr. 2. Let Them Scroll There’s no need to pack everything into the top portion of your website anymore. Times have changed. Remember,
You’ve updated your website, and now you’re ready to sit back and watch the sales roll in! But there’s a problem. Your website is impressive, but the masses aren’t flocking to it as you had hoped. And, when they do go there, it seems like they’re only looking around and not ordering. What’s the deal? If you’re struggling to get the kind of traffic to your website that you were hoping for, below are five tips to help you market it successfully and get the results you want. 1. Change your mindset The best thing you can do to get people to your website is to retrain your brain on how to get them there. Putting up a fancy-pants website doesn’t mean your print buyers will instantly flock to it. That’s sort of like putting a basket of clean laundry in front of some teenagers and assuming they’ll fold clothes. (Sigh.) So, if you’ve spent the last decade or more training prospects and customers to call you to order their printing or to email you directly, it’s going to take some effort to retrain them to go to your website. With “gazelle intensity,” as Dave Ramsey says, retrain your brain
“How do I get them coming back for more?” As a print owner, chances are that thought has rattled around your head more than once. Let’s face it, getting print buyers to order printing from you and then continue to order printing from you isn’t always easy. This is especially true when you consider how your competitors are just a click away screaming and flashing their wares as cheaper, better, more convenient, and any other flashy adjectives they can throw your way. But, don’t let that discourage you. You DO have some powerful weapons at your disposal. One of those heavy hitters is Private Label Websites. The Sticking Power of Private Label Websites By providing a custom, branded, print-buying experience for your corporate customers that they can then pass along to their print-buyers, you’ll create a steady inflow of print orders through your website. “I went from about twelve orders a month ten years ago to averaging 180-240 orders per month from online storefronts. Plus, 90% of the storefronts I’ve set up for customers have been used longer than eight years.” – Gary Chmielewski, Northern Ohio Printing What’s in it for You? As with anything in life, there is some effort required to
What happens when you pour water into a cup? It takes the shape of a cup. Into a fishbowl? It takes the form of the fishbowl. You see the pattern here; water always takes the shape of the container it’s poured into. The water responds to the container; the water is responsive. It’s the same thing with website content: Website content takes the shape of the device displaying the content. Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase responsive website: The website content responds to the device that’s displaying the content, and that is what makes a website responsive. That’s why certain websites (like the one you’re viewing now) look great whether viewed on a desktop computer, a tablet, or a mobile device. Give it a try. Pull up this blog post on all your devices, and you’ll see the content beautifully displayed in a manner that fits the device being used. The Mobile Tipping Point There’s no shortage of studies showing the widespread adoption of mobile devices. As a planet, we crossed the tipping point in October 2016. (See Mobile and tablet internet usage exceeds desktop for first time worldwide.) We’ve not yet reached that level of penetration in the United States, but we will soon!
Have you ever tried to land that big corporate account, only to have your prospect ask if you can provide a private “storefront” website for their employees to buy from? Did you have to say “no” and lose the prospect? With Private Label Websites from Marketing Ideas For Printers, you can set up your clients for success by saying “yes” and win those big corporate contracts again and again! Create the Perfect Purchasing Experience By proactively creating Private Label Websites for your corporate customers, you provide their employees with all the convenient features of your website’s regular online storefront, except it’s customized to fit their own branding. Their employees get a purchasing experience that fits right in with the rest of their corporate intranet, and you get to enjoy the steady stream of sales that come along with those big accounts. Our most successful printer customers use Private Label Websites as the “ace up their sleeve” to land their biggest prospects. Using our convenient set-up tools, they can build a custom-tailored Private Label Website in ten minutes, with no programming experience needed! They don’t just tell their prospects they can deliver–they show them! Make Switching Not Worth It For Your
What You Don’t Need To Worry About, And What You Should Look Into You’ve probably been hearing quite a bit lately about a security flaw, called Heartbleed, that was recently discovered on the internet that impacted several big sites on the web. And we’ve started to get questions from you about it. We’ll keep it simple: Your website with WebsitesForPrinters.com was not vulnerable to this bug, and no action is required of you or your customers to protect your accounts. However, our email service partner was affected by this bug. They patched it within 24 hours of the bug being announced, leading to some down time earlier this week as they patched their server. As a result of that change, some of our customers had to update their server settings in their email clients. Meanwhile, several large internet sites were affected. Here’s a list of the biggest sites that were vulnerable as of April 8th: Vulnerable sites report If you use those sites, it’s advisable to change your password (after you’ve confirmed with them that they’ve patched this, that is). And, as usual, it’s always important to use a different password for each website you use.
Out With The Old… It may be cliche, but it’s true all the same: all good things must come to an end. Our good friend Jay Nelson, publisher of Design Tools Monthly, has announced that after 21 years of producing the Design Tools Monthly newsletter he will now be taking an extended vacation. He’s definitely earned it, but we’ll be sorry to see it go. An online subscription to Design Tools Monthly was available as an add-on to Websites For Printers Level 2 websites, and bundled into Level 3 websites. So, where do we go from here? For the time being, we do not have a replacement for the Design Tools Monthly newsletter. (We tend to think that Jay is irreplaceable!) The existing issues that are currently on your site will remain there in the near term. But they’ll start aging pretty quickly since they do such a good job of providing current news, so we plan to remove them at the end of the year. …In With The New While we’re sad to see Design Tools Monthly drawing to a close, we are happy to showcase the recent release of an exciting new feature: Private Label Websites. More and more print buyers
Private Label Websites More and more, your corporate customers are asking to order their printing from a website that looks like their corporate website, even though you’ll be managing it. What’s a small commercial printer do? How can you afford to build a new website to serve only one client?! Delivering What Corporate Customers Want That’s where our new Private Label Websites feature comes in. With Private Label Websites, you are now only 15 minutes away from delivering the same full-featured ordering system you provide for all of your customers through your WebsitesForPrinters.com website, branded to your corporate clients! Not only do these new features make it easy for you to provide a full print ordering system that’s fully branded to any corporate client that asks for it, but you can do so quickly and easily with the user-friendly tools built right into your Control Center. A Strategic Decision Strategically, Private Label Websites also help you turn your corporate clients into permanent customers. Historically, custom-branded ordering sites have proven to be extremely difficult for a customer to walk away from. So this is a clear win-win: your customers get a branded website that makes it easy for them to buy