Earn a profit when you distribute your promotional gifts

Have you put some effort into seeing what can be done to cut down your marketing outgoings? Have you been considering about not giving promotional items this year? What a mistake that could be! Do send them – just make sure that they earn money for you, before you even buy them!

Most companies when looking at promotional items look at pens, diaries and the likes. These are superb and easy to distribute, but usually have only sufficient printing space for your message. With the current financial credit crunch you need to be thinking beyond the obvious. How can you make your promotional gifts work for you, before you send them? How can you make sure that you cover the outlay by the time you distribute them?

Most promotional gifts work along the lines of reminding your recipients of you so they are more likely to come back to you again or more likely to refer you to their contacts. Fine, but how can you put a figure on this return when business everywhere is struggling?

Quite simply, get paid to distribute your own promotional products. Not a huge sum, just enough to cover the production and distribution costs. Don’t be greedy and companies will be happy to work with you and effectively your promotional gifts are free.

This is easily done by selling advertising space on your gifts. So here I’m not talking promotional gifts with small print areas, I’m talking larger, but still cheap, gifts with plenty of print space. We’re looking at calendars, mouse mats and clothing.

Clothing is fine to cover with plenty of other logos if you are giving the gifts out at an event and calendars can cost that little bit more, so personally mouse mats are my favourite here. It’s amazingly simple to arrange. Across the top of the mouse mat print your logo and contact details then split the rest of the mat into 2. Most of the remaining area is used to carry a calendar or photos of your products – this gives the mouse mat a purpose – a reason for the recipient to keep it and use it.

Then the rest of the area is available for a few adverts or a list of recommended other suppliers. This area is sufficient to hold a number of logos or a dozen or more website addresses. Depending which you opt for, charge a small amount per advert space and fill it up with adverts. The more mats you are using the better it is for the advertisers – the more your advert is being seen. You can even give them one when they are finished so they feel they have got something for their cash!

But, why would people want to pay to be on your mouse mats? Well, it works on a couple of levels. First, you know the recipients and they are your clients. Therefore, they will see these adverts not as adverts, but as referrals. Also, because they are your clients, you know something about them. For example, a web designer might know they are distributing the mouse mats to small businesses. Therefore accountants, printers and the likes might be of interest as well to their clients.

This is the special knowledge that makes this trick brilliant – you know what your average client is interested in – so think about what other businesses might also want to target your clients.

And if you are looking for a free traffic from Google to your online business – then it’s absolutely vital for you to visit this site and read how to do that.