You have a new business and you want to let everyone know. While you have signed up for your very first telephone book ad, you just missed the new book, so it will be several months until people can find you there. You have seen other options, like advertising on local cable announcement channels, but you just aren’t sure if they are going to get results. What about designing a business postcard?

Business postcards are a great way to announce a new business quickly to a large group of people. You can design them to look the way you want them to look and can target specific people or businesses, which makes them a very cost effective option.

Of course, to mail the cards out, you’ll need to get the mailing addresses for your potential customers. If you are short on time, you can buy a mailing address list for your location from companies that specialize in collecting mailing addresses. You may still want to go through the list to weed out addresses that you know are wrong for your business, but you will still save considerable time.

If you have plenty of time on your hands and are tight on cash, you can create your own mailing list. Online phone directories with search functions make it much easier than it used to be to look up certain types of businesses or to find a group of addresses in one area.

You would love to make your own postcards, but you just aren’t sure quite where to start. How hard is it to design your own cards with VistaPrint? Can someone without much computer experience do it? If you can handle clicking a mouse, you can handle postcard printing through VistaPrint. It really is as simple as pointing and clicking, with a bit of typing thrown in. To make your postcards, you should:

• 1.  Begin by deciding on a design that suits the occasion. If you don’t find the perfect design, you can create your own postcard from scratch and upload it, but to do this, you will need just a bit more computer savvy than someone who has a few basic mouse skills.
• 2.  Write your text in the available spaces and adjust the font size and style to create a nicely balanced postcard. If all of your text doesn’t fit easily, you can add more text boxes. Just be sure you don’t crowd too much information on the cards. If you have a lot to say, consider pointing people to a website with complete details instead of cramming it all on the card.
• 3.  Thoroughly proof the postcards to be sure you have not made any typos and then place your order.