leaflet / postcard diy design & print quantities

[squidge]

morning all

going to start looking at creating a flyer or postcard or something similar for the b&b to pop in all of the local tourist info centres. two questions!:

1) will i just be able to play around with some words and pictures/photos in msword and then convert it to a pdf?! i haven't got any posh software but i'd like to try and do it myself if it's possible. don't know what the best way of going about it is.

2) any ideas on what type of quantity would be good? in your experiemce, how many leaflet things have tourist offices generally take off your hands? tricky to know whether to get 100 or 1,000 bits of pretty paper printed!! 

that's it for now...... until i've properly woken up and thought of other things as well.....

thanks

squidge x

 

 

 

 

 

[Blanche Neige]

Squidge

There are some very reasonable prices now for printing postcards (well at least there are in U.K.) and generally the more you have printed in one go the cheaper it becomes.

 

Leaflets if they are displayed in a stand tend to flop and get rather tatty. I think they are likely to be picked up and then discarded, stuffed in a bag or binned. ( well that was my experience when working at a visitor information centre)

Postcards with an attractive picture are more likely to be kept, saved and read again.

 

I am sure others will have some good advice.

[Russethouse]

Have you considered bookmarks instead of postcards ? They have a good 'keepability' factor !

[squidge]

yup - thought the same! but seems to be a bit more tricky to find an cheap online company to print them.....!

[LEO]

[quote user="squidge"]

yup - thought the same! but seems to be a bit more tricky to find an cheap online company to print them.....!

[/quote]

I recently used VistaPrint online printing .

Was very pleased both with the price and quality.

[Lachouette]

We've had two different lots of postcards from Vistaprint - one that just shows a watercolour of our place - visitors take them away FOC, I use them to acknowledge deposits and our website address is on the back, and another for our local tourist office that has a smaller version of the same pic plus write-up in French and English and a map.  First lot were postage only for 100 and the second lot the same, plus about £4 to upload a pdf file.  Vistaprint always have an offer so you rarely have to pay for more than the postage for a modest quantity, and it's easy to use the UK site but have your goods delivered to a French address.

Will forward our pdf for you to look at if you're interested and send me a pm.

Jan

[Cassis]

Like the others, I agree that Vistaprint is good - but beware of all the extras that you get drawn into, they are so tempting!

Does your TO accept postcards etc?  Worth asking them what they actually will do with them, or whether they even want them - one of ours doesn't take leaflets or postcards or business cards, and in the other two they get shoved in a forgotten corner.

Even if the Offices do take them, unless there is a lot of passing casual trade, postcards etc. in

Tourist Offices may be a waste of time - try them for a season and then

review.  Almost all of our business is booked in advance - but your

area may be different, so it could be worth trying a small quantity.

If you want free software for converting Word to pdf then I think PDFCreator is the best (I've tried a few).