Last night RO and I mailed out 5000 post cards.

We found this great website (CardStore.com) that lets us easily do all sorts of bulk mailings. It has made one of store's the biggest chores easy.

The only advertising we know works is direct mailings to our customers of about 5,000 people. Unfortunatly few bulk mailers will touch bulk orders for less than 10,000 addresses. Mailing out 5,000 post cards by hand is big pain in the ass

First you need to find a printing shop who can do a mail-merge-- take your address list and print the addresses on each post card. I'm suprised how difficult that is. The last company that did it for us, wrecked so many post cards when they went through the 2nd printing pass that the told us they would never do a mail merge again. At another print-shop only one guy know how to do the mail-merge. When he went he left, we were SOL.

After you have 5,000 addressed post cards, you have to buy 5,000 stamps and affix them to said postcards. This is tedious. It takes four of us hours to complete the job.

Post office people look at you funny when you ask for 5,000 stamps.

Then we stumbled upon CardStore. Now all we have to do is upload our mailing list and a couple of images, enter a credit card number and voila-- instant junk mail. In less than an hour we can do what used to take two days and four car trips.

One day this internet thing is going to catch on.