Survey for friend...Outer Circle Publications HOTSHEET, Your opinion valued...

[GordonJ]

Both mail houses I used frequently have gone out of business, but I will shop around.
Unless she gets to quantities, she'd like to keep it simple, maybe 2,000 max.

How this would work is,

anyone has the ability to create their own HOTSHEETS to be mailed along, this could be 2 pages (one sheet of paper) or 4 pages on an 11 by 17 folded piece of paper.

A 2 page hotsheet can have front and 3/4 of back, the bottom 1/4 reserved for the publisher to use

A 4 page would have 3 1/2 page of content with back bottom 1/2 for publisher.

Example could be

CARRIER Hotsheet (Publisher) Granny C's Dumpster Diving Diva Hotsheet, a 4 pager which is about buying and selling other people junk's and Granny C would advertise her reports and affiliate programs along with her content...

Some of the 2 pagers which ride along could be

Gordon's Chattel HOTSHEET
Art's Ephemera Hotsheet
Bill's Toy Collectibles
Cathy's Tea Cups for china collectors

Old IC pubs contained as many as 15 to 20 hotsheets, and all had to be camera ready...but each accepted it's own paid advertising...

There were a few that were even printed on newsprint and came as tabloids, still several in the collectibles market you mention...stamps, coins and other collectibles still have these monthly news papers out there.

I FEEL she should do everything her self until she needs to scale up that way she knows how to troubleshoot future snafus...and understands her business.

Biz OP could include trading, collecting and bartering...or anything at all.

Recipes were big, I think they still are so Felicia's Recipe Club could be a seperate hotsheet inserted into the publishers hot sheet.

With a 1000 pieces she can get a pre sort from USPS and not have to pay full first class retail. But, if she gets up to 20 or 200.000 subscribers (FREE)
then she needs to go to economies.

I still like to get mags and newsletters in the mail and perhaps people would enjoy these throw back type of personalized little hotsheets.

Thanks again Ankesh, always great advice from you, she'll see it.

Gordon Alexander

Originally Posted by Ankesh

1. You don't want to print and do your own mailing. You want to outsource your mailing. There are companies who will handle bulk mailing and all you have to do is send them 2 files. 1 PDF file with the mailing content. 1 csv or excel file with addresses in it. If you use aweber or some such service for collecting the addresses, then importing a csv file from them is a breeze.

Also, outsourcing the printing and mailing is not so expensive. Because these guys make their profit in getting a discount for mailing thousands of pieces from USPS - but don't pass that discount to you. But because of them earning the difference between normal mailing price and discounted mailing, you can negotiate pretty well on the price per mail that they charge you.

2. I'm not sure if money making opportunity seekers is a good target audience for something like this. You want a target audience that buy and sell from each other constantly. So a better audience is people who collect stuff. Maybe a list for stamp collectors. People can either list the stamps they want to buy. Or list stamps they have for sale. Multiple stamp listing = more money.