Over the last few months, I seem to be dealing with more and more start ups. These are for the most part small home based businesses done on the side to gain some extra income. But for every business they need a logo, a website, letterhead, business card and promotional/advertising material.
Each of them has the same limited budget for all of this, and when they start having to pay for design of these items, printing costs come into play. Can they afford to get a thousand business cards printed for something that might not take off? Well, no. And they certainly don’t want to invest in thousands of flyers advertising their business when they may change their business model in six months.

So, what options do they have? Well, if the designer supplies them print ready PDFs for all the business cards and letterheads, they can choose to use a short run printer, or to save hassle use one of the online printing services. Printing via one of these is quite simply a case of setting up your user account and loading the artwork. You get a PDF proof emailed back, and then once you approve it, it gets printed and shipped to you. The bonus being you can get short runs printed, and if you take off in business instead of getting 50 cards printed, you can go back and get 500 or 1,000.

I have found this helps restrict initial costs for the business and its something they can do to test market reactions to new advertising before rolling out a huge run of a flyer. An early cost saving can sometimes mean the life or death of a business, especially when you are trying to pay for advertising, design AND the printing all at once, invariably before any real income for the business is being generated!

That’s right, I have found a great little site that converts your existing mp3 files to m4r files to use as iphone ringtones. Longer songs will need to be cutdown using the interface on the site, but for those of us who already have a bag full of mp3 ringtones from older phones, this is a handy little tool to get them converted.

mp3 to m4r

I know I have quite a few to convert and put up for sharing!

This is the totally NON PC ringtone from the Hahn Super Dry ad.

Okay, I admit it, I wanted this as soon as I heard it, and found it very quickly. But now with the new iphone in hand, I wanted it as a ringtone, and I had to convert it to an .m4r so here it is in zip format for you to download and add to your iphones as well!

Hahn Super Dry Ringtone