Printing

RISO Press best for production colour

Posted in: Blog, Printing, Real Estate, Technology by Paul McEwan on December 16, 2010 | No Comments

Here is a great little printer by RISO. I have used a number of these in my day and they keep making them better since my print house days. Because they use ink and not heat to fuse the image, they run 95% less energy and way faster than convention digital presses. Add to that the soy based inks and you have a pretty green machine. The video above shows the newest two colour machine. They have a full colour and single colour version as well.

Quality? this is not for high end printing but it’s not terrible either. The output quality on a RISO is stock dependent, meaning different grades of paper change the quality by miles. But I have seen prices for printing retailing full colour starting at 8 cents each for 1 to 10 pieces. That’s Cheap!

Pros: Very green, inexpensive to operate, extremely fast 1, 2 & 4-full colour output, easy to run, They are very capable of variable data printing.

Cons: Although best in it’s class ”Production Colour” means it’s a lower quality.

Summery: This is a great little machine for those things you would normally run in black and white or absolutely need to have run in full colour but don’t have the budget for it. Let’s face it, high end printing isn’t necessary all the time. This machine is perfect for those times so go and find a printer who owns one.

MyRealPage Postcard Marketing Campaign

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Printing, Real Estate by Paul McEwan on March 22, 2010 | 1 Comment

You are not JUST ANOTHER REALTOR.

Not if you are a myRealPage Realtor.
You are a SmartPhone Enabled Realtor and that’s exciting!
You also have VOW and many other advanced website features many don’t have or don’t know about.

Why not direct people to your website with a proper marketing campaign.

TribalYell will help you inform prospects of your website features with FREE content on the back of your postcard campaign.

Don’t have a postcard campaign?
TribalYell has that ball already rolling for you too. Here’s our solution to help get your prospects online.

Here’s what you get:

• 1 Custom postcard design (with your branding)
• 18,000 postcards printed with your custom design on side 1
• 3 x6,000 campaigns pre-printed side 2 (marketing aimed at increasing website traffic)
• Delivered to 1,500 owners in your farm area once a month for a full year rotating the message every month.

Each ad rotation comes with a “badge” for your website that ties the message together like this one below.

Claim your area now (We will not deliver more than one campaign per area)

One cost covers

• design
• print
• postage
• delivery to the post office
• 3 website badges

Start now

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The fastest way to get printed material produced

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Printing by Paul McEwan on February 2, 2010 | No Comments

It’s not easy to explain printing processes and short run digital vs long run offset to those who “just want it printed”. There is a belief that the smaller the amount, the less money. But doing things this way will cost way more in the long run. The fastest way to get printed material produced is to pre-print colour “Shells” professionally and then imprint the information in black  in a blank area in the design, (perhaps your own laser printer). The most simple form of this is letterhead. Yes, it’s still cheaper to have your letterhead professionally printed and stored for your use at a later time.

Bulk, pre-printed colour shells stored for imprinting later are called called “Shells”. Shells need to be printed offset and in large quantities. When you do this, you will pay fractions of the cost compared to printing short run. Here’s why:

Digital:
Is basically a giant Xerox (digital laser) machine. The “ink” is actually a type of plastic fused onto the paper with heat. It’s far more expensive and slower to come off the digital press. It seems faster to the customer because there is no waiting time for plates to be made, press to be set or ink to dry. But in reality, a press can produce more per minute.

Offset:
Is ink to paper, (laying into the paper). Never will anyone purchase 500 or 1000 pieces of offset printing because there is a set up to get the press to run the job and a drying time for the ink. This is why 1000 pieces cost the same as (or close to) 2500 pieces. Some printers minimums are around 5000 pieces for offset. Once set up the cost per piece is a fraction of the cost of digital printing.

Important: You can not run a digital printed piece back through a digital printer (laser) again for risk of delaminating the first print job. (remember, the “ink” on digital printing is a type of plastic). The heat that fuses on your imprinting will de-laminate your past printing. Sometimes it works. Many times people wonder why their printer stopped working and jammed so badly.

Cost:
Full colour, full bleed postcards printed one side and stored at the printer for imprinting short run black and white on the back when needed cost about $700 to $800 for the first 10,000 (offset of course) and about half as much more for double the amount and so on.

The black and white side is about $85 for the first 1000 imprints and $55 for every 1000 (or partial) there after.

The “Simplify Your Marketing” seminar explained a lot of the different cost effective touch points we offer that are not only priced well but easy and fast to implement in a moment’s notice. The seminar explained how design and marketing departments work and how to save on design billing.