It seems like things have slowed down a bit for the summer vacation season. That’s not so bad, as it has allowed us to work on some of the other initiatives we have going.
We launched a new vertical website called ZedCardsPlus.com, using SiteGrinder for the design and PageDNA for the back-end web-to-print solution. As we spend more time with PageDNA, we find that we have not yet really scratched the surface for everything that it can do. We’ve created variable image designs; variable text templates; and now experimenting with the mail merge aspect of the system. It’s also a very inexpensive entry to web to print without sacrificing anything. Some of the systems we looked at required a $30,000 startup fee and the features they had were very similar to that of PageDNA. When we enter into year 2 of the Social Print Experiment, I don’t anticipate we’ll be making a change to any other web to print system – this one grows with us as we grow.
Zed Cards Plus is starting to get some traction for business. We created a Twitter account and a Facebook page, and have been adding followers and fans for the last month. This site is targeted towards the retail market for models and actors, so it’s outside of the trade printer services window we’ve been working from. It also has been getting a lot of word of mouth business from other happy customers (models), so each day we see incrementally a little more business.
Each piece is printed 4/4 and then we gloss coat it with our TEC Lighting UV Coater. The UV coating material we use comes from TEC and is formulated to adhere well to toner-based printing products. Ken is working on a full review of the coater which will appear in a few days, now that he has used it continually for the past month. I think you’ll find it very informative!
Having run the MGI DP60 press for the last 9 months, we’ve really gotten a handle on how to maximize the use of the press. We run almost nothing through the trays and prefer the feeder table for perfect front to back registration. MGI’s documentation says to expect up to a 2mm variance which is pretty tight already, but our trade customers have been impressed with the registration. We’ve also experimented with many more types of stock and also with envelopes, and have had very good results with both. There’s not a lot this press couldn’t do, and we’ve been pleased with our investment in it. We did see a new product from MGI that we would like to acquire, the JetVarnish, which does a spot UV coating plus one color, but that may have to wait until Social Print Experiment 2.0. Speaking with MGI recently about the JetVarnish, they expect to be offering metallic and Pantone colors in the near future to go with the spot UV coating.
We’re also continuing to work on our own social media initiatives. Our Twitter account has passed the 4,000 mark, which seems like it’s moving slowly upwards but only because I weed out the spam and scam followers to keep our list purely digital print oriented. Twitter click-throughs are now averaging around 1% of the total list size, but by keeping our list industry focused we are seeing a better return. The downside is that we spend about 8 hours a week managing the Twitter stream.
Last, I also sold my news site Digital Print 360 to WhatTheyThink.com, giving me more time to spend on the Social Print Experiment. Running the Digital Print 360 site was practically a full-time job and being able to just be a contributor to WhatTheyThink will free up more time for me. (That might even allow me to sleep four hours a night instead of three, but we’ll see how my body takes the change).
Overall, August is slow but the work at the Social Print Experiment goes on. We’ll continue to keep you posted with our progress and our sales numbers.
No related posts.
Comments on this entry are closed.