Way back in 1995 I decided to start learning to do business on the Internet. Since I have two home-schooled boys (Devin and Dustin), I decided this would be a great opportunity to teach them about building a business, as well as entrepreneurship and ethics. So, my wife, Camille, my two sons, and I started a family business. In order to help promote sales of the first products we tried selling on the Internet, we offered free 8"x10" downloadable files of designs that I created. We started with 10 designs. People could download and print them for free using their home printers. At that time, we weren't selling our designs... they were freebies to draw traffic.
What we found was there was more interest in our poster designs than there was in the other products we were trying to sell. Our strategy worked alright... but it didn't quite do what we wanted. So, we changed a couple of things. First, we changed the free size to 5"x7" so they could fit on a standard size piece of paper. That way, when folks visited our website and saw a design they liked - they could simply print the page directly from our website - not have to download the design. SIMPLIFY!
But, we had numerous requests from folks wanting to buy printed versions of our poster designs. You see, back in the mid-90's not a lot of people had good color printers. So, we started offering our designs for sale in 4 sizes. Back then we printed them ourselves, and laminated them for protection against smearing or crinkling. We continued adding new designs, and built a "fan base".
Then in 1999, we decided it was time to focus on selling our designs in a more commercial fashion. It was on 11/11/99 we officially started P-R Posters™ (P-R stands for Peltier-Robson - our family name). Back then we had around 80 designs, and we still printed them ourselves. That was a lot of work!
Being an "old school" Internet merchant, I was still deeply committed to offering all of our designs for Free (as printable designs). So we started a second website (Print-A-Poster.com) that focused on the 5"x7" free printable designs of our entire collection (we now have over 400 original designs). People could simply print the webpage that had the design on it. This has been incredibly popular over the years.
Our main company website was P-RPosters.com and was designed to lead people through the purchase process (and did not include any freebies). To this day that's the way we continue to grow our business. We offer our freebies from our Print-A-Poster website. Luckily, we enjoy high search engine rankings for a variety of good keywords (especially in Google). So this draws people to our main (for sale) website. We also have a large following for our Free printable website (especially among schools).
One of the things we have done on the free website is that we still have "buy now" buttons for all of our designs. This way we do receive some sales from that website as well. Also, the Free website earns income from Google adSense ads, so that makes it self-sufficient. It doesn't make us a ton of money... but it was always geared to the whole concept of SHARING. Like I said - "old school".
Now, with the economy as bad as it is, we decided to re-double our efforts to start promoting the Print-A-Poster website again. We sense that lots of folks need motivation... and will appreciate our collection of over 400 original designs they can print for free. Multiple millions of our little designs have been printed over the years, and hang in cubicles and classrooms around the World. This is most rewarding in and of itself. But with increased traffic, there is the possibility and probability of increased sales and ad revenue. Growth!
Sure, we continue to market our for sale designs. In fact in 2003 we started offering our posters printed commercially in more sizes, and last year we even started offering them available framed. Our goal is to make a significant income from our efforts. But we are still on the path.
So, yes, I guess we do make some money from offering our free designs. But, mostly, it's our way to get our designs in front of people, and to share with the World. Our costs for the freebie website are minimal... and the potential good is enormous. So we're delighted to continue to do it this way.
And, even if I knew we would make significantly more money by not having our designs available as free printables - I would still choose to continue offering them for free. Like I said, I'm an old school Internet Merchant. That's how we are. Back when the Internet started it wasn't only about making money. It was about bringing folks together, and sharing. Motivation should be shared!
So, that's our story in a nutshell.
I invite you to check out our company websites:
P-R Posters™ Motivational Companies
(our main website and portal to our other websites)
Print-A-Poster.com
(our Free Printable Poster website)
MotivationPosters.com
(Motivational Poster Designs by other artists)
SpanishMotivationPosters.com
(Spanish versions of over 150 of our designs)
CustomCorporatePosters.com
(Custom Created Posters for Businesses)
My-Exclusive-Poster.com
(Custom Created posters for Individuals)
Business Motivation Posters
(Custom Created Posters for Speakers)
Educators Resource
CD.com
(A Teachers Motivational Resource)
Bible Verse
Posters
(Christian Posters)
Native American Insights
(Native American Poster Designs)
