If you run a small business, I don't need to tell you that every minute you (or your staff) spend buying printing is time you could have spent working on strategy, or customer service, or some other critical business function.

You don't have time to spend with Printing salespeople. You don't have time to research print production or electronic procurement.

That is where a Print Broker can help!

It is his job to find right suppliers to produce your work in most timely and efficient manner possible; and then supervise those suppliers to make sure your job is delivered as ordered -- all for less than what it would cost you to do it yourself. Imagine that!!

Wouldn't it be nice to have one source that offers a wide range of printed products so you could focus on other aspects of your work? The right broker can help by offering many printing services to suit your needs while eliminating inefficiencies of dealing with multiple vendors.

So, how do you select proper broker?

It should be a person that has been around industry for a long time. Someone who knows printing and graphics business inside and out and is well connected in all areas of Graphic Arts.

First, familiarizing yourself with your website’s conversion rate

What is percentage that a sale will be made with 100 unique visitors to your website? Let’s assume that only 1 visitor will make a purchase. That means your website has a conversion rate of 1%.

Although traffic quality that you get from a pay-per-click search engine may differ from that of a traditional search engine or any other advertising measures, familiarizing with your website’s conversion rate will definitely give a better gauge to how much you are going to bid than a calculated guess.

Let’s take this for an example: assume your conversion rate is 1%. You’ll need 100 clicks to your site before you can make 1 sale. Convert it and its $10 if your bid is Overture’s minimum bid of $0.10 per click.

Using this as a gauge, you can estimate if your advertising cost is going to be covered back by that 1 sale. If so, then would you be willing to increase your budget to increase your clicks and sales? Will this make you a bigger profit or a loss?

You will be able to use this to test out your marketing strategy and thus maximizing profits while cutting down on costs.

Second, are you using right keyword phrases for search?

The key to more sales is to target right market with right product. On internet, using right keyword phrases for visitors to search for your website is absolutely crucial.

This is because if you use wrong keyword phrases, you ended up with lots of unwanted traffic that costs you your bidding money. But if you use a keyword phrase that no one searches for it, then even worse, you ended up with no traffic at all.