The Joy Of Stickers

By StickerNation.com

The Joy Of Stickers

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stickers get you noticed.

Everybody loves stickers
With stickers of your logo, you will have durable tool that is portable and fun. Stickers are great icebreakers and party favors that spread any message. You can give them away at conferences like SXSW or send them in the mail to promote your band to radio stations and magazines. In this guide we will go over some of the best ways to deploy stickers in order to engage your audience and place your project front and center. If you like this report, please spread it to as many people as might make use of it. You can forward this at will.

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Picture yourself in control of the success of your projects You spend hours every week creating through your project. Taking time out to actually get people to check it out is often not as much fun. If you are in a band, you play songs, x them up, rehearse, nd shows, get airplay, and connect with your fans. If you're launching a startup, there are an innite number of details to attend to, and most of them relate to delivering a quality product. If you are in a sorority, your time is caught up toward meeting activities and whipping up morale. If you are a preacher, you decide what to cover and do your best to ll the pews. If you run a blog, you worry about what to post next. Creative people are superbusy creating; small wonder they only rarely nd the time, energy, for budget to promote what they have worked so hard to deliver. But popularity is so much fun! Somehow, the creative task becomes a joy every time you connect with a fan. Having an audience makes creativity ow. But the task of promoting your own creative efforts can feel forced, egotistical and tedious not to mention expensive, if you consider placing paid advertisements anywhere. We wanted to make promo a breeze. One's instinct as a creative is to feel that the quality of your creation will be so powerful that it promotes itself. Occasionally, creatives get "lucky" I doubt the Jonas Brothers had to tour in an Econoline van but even such "lottery tickets" have strings attached that personally I don't think would suit me, such as utter lack of creative control. This guide addresses several types of people that could use custom vinyl stickers to him prove their situations. I switch among these use cases uidly in my writing, addressing musicians, bloggers, people in faith-based organizations and small retail businesses. This is because every independent project can benet from stickers. Let's begin!

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Every project needs an audience to unlock its full potential Sometimes I fool myself into believing that I create in a vacuum. I am so delighted by the results of my own creativity. Frankly, I think I'm a genius. I certainly have my aws, but when it comes to my creative output, I believe that I am unique and without equal. I hope you feel that way too. If not, don't despair; I only feel this way because I have gotten used to surprising myself with sudden ashes of inspiration that channel through me like lightning. These spontaneous bouts of genius are almost involuntary, and as a result I can barely take credit. Creativity to me is more than just fun. This attitude in and of itself is incomplete. Try paying the rent on pure self-appreciation and you'll quickly nd yourself on the street. Today, everybody can publish and is publishing. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr occupy the attention of toddler and grandma alike - which is why selling to people who take these networks seriously forms the core of our business. That means there is a lot of competition for attention and you are going to need a method to help your efforts shine through, promising an amazing experience to the unaware. Only a certain kind of person is up to it. You have every right to demand attention for your creative output All art and creative output is inherently narcissistic. Every quality creator of anything believes they are doing the best possible job according to their own tastes and priorities. In the case of corporations, the priorities of prot and homogenization outweigh the craft and attention to detail of projects such as yours. Even forced labor knows they are doing the best they can, under the ghastly regimes under which they toil. We all feel we are the best artist.

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Because each creative "knows" they are valid, unique, and perhaps even the best in their class, it's hard to avoid the "look at me!" syndrome when showing your work or nding new fans. Therefore, all marketing is egotism. Except I dene the "superego" as being akin to the zeitgeist. Therefore, all marketing is superegotism - an effort to inuence the collective soul of society or a subculture - or just one person - to place your soul at the center of attention for a little bit. Your own ego and the value it generates through its glorious creativity has every right to inuence this collective superego just as much right to my mind as the insipid brands that parade across the ad spots during the Super Bowl and the nightly news. Your project, indeed, has even more right to my attention then some corporate brand I already know about. After all, your small project is probably news to me. That makes it worthy of my attention. So give me a sticker so I'll remember to check it out when I get home! Good promo happens one person at a time How does someone like you get attention? You can seek publicity in a variety of ways, or you can grow your audience organically. To grow organically, often you've got to give something away. You could give your music away on CDs, or you could give free coffee away with every breakfast sandwich but you could also give away stickers. And charge for your CDs and coffee. Picture yourself in a crowd of people who you would love to have as users, customers, or fans. How would you make that happen? With 1000 stickers to give away, you would have a pretty good chance. All you have to do is design what goes on those stickers in such a way that you get people to really want them to want several, in fact. Visualize what it would do for your creative motivation to have an active, engaged audience. Imagine your retail business drawing foot
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trafc would that not make you improve your store faster? The quality of your own creative efforts is just unfolding if you have not yet found an audience. Capture an audience, captivate them over time, and you can (and will!) create anything you want for that audience. They'll even pay you to do so. I call this "creative control". Don't be a victim of the ignorance of the modern, hectic marketplace of attention. Give them a reason to pay attention to you by being the very best that's a given. But once you believe in yourself, reach out to the marketplace with stickers. Make the scene know your name. Don't let unawareness of your project douse your creative spark. Say It With Stickers If you create something that is hard to describe, you will nd it a breeze to hand out stickers that lead people to a website where you can describe it fully, rather then engaging in a complicated song and dance to explain your project anew to each person to whom you'd like to evangelize it. It's easier to give someone you meet a sticker than only say "go to my webpage" or "I'm an artist, really" or "we're a band". Many modern products are virtual. Whether you are promoting a mobile app or a rock 'n roll band, a blog or an independent movie or radio station, it's hard to spread the word without some tangibility. Stickers can make virtual projects tangible, letting you literally hand an avatar of your project out at a conference or slap your logo and value proposition up when you come across the perfect social surface. Even if your project is tangible, create a logo that when printed on stickers will spread word further than your physical products alone. All brands are intangible. The products they represent may be tangible, but the emotions and associations each product triggers can be included in the concept of "brand". We don't pay the full price for the commodity of the physical object we tend to pay extra for the
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right "brand". You could almost say that the prot margin of any product or service lies not in its existence on the material plane, but rather in the ethereal psychological realm of "brand value". Stickers can make brands like yours spread socially in the fastest, most economical and fun way. Every project that considers itself a brand can boost its acceptance and cultivate its phenomenology through spread on custom vinyl stickers. Don't just create; LAUNCH. Stickers are also reliable. They will show up on your doorstep and you will start spreading them. It's so easy that anyone can do it. Give out stickers every month and you will nd an audience looking forward to your next batch every time - and tuning into your podcast as well. Your stickers can change every month, and bringing people into your shop for the new design on a regular basis, and letting you spread your brand further than the connes of your four walls. Having a regular, dependable promo strategy like this can give you security that you will remain top of mind in your category despite any rufes in the economy. If you give out stickers, you will get attention back. But the stickers aren't going to spread themselves. You're going to have to put muscle into getting them out there. One word: teamwork. To get an audience for your project, you must promote your project Be realistic: there are millions of ways people can spend their attention and your project is not beginning at the top of anyone's list. Expect your genius to be drowned out unless you take serious control of its promotion. Do not expect more than a modicum of attention for your creation without taking into account exactly how awareness of it will spread. Clever creative execution can do tons for inherently spreading awareness, but you are talented we know that. Not enough others do yet, though. That's what stickers can solve for you.

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When something you create must be kicked off in some way, it's time to consider promo. See stickers as the fuel launching your rocketship. Promo should be considered part of your project. As your band writes its rst songs, start a notebook to collect promo opportunities and ideas, and keep on the lookout for more.You can wait for trafc to come to your website, or you can go out there and grab it by the horns and bring it in. I can't do anything about the quality of your project if you can't play, get off stage, for God's sake! but I do know that stickers have helped thousands of bands get recognition in their scenes. So harness the power of printing custom vinyl stickers for your project to spread in your social environment. What would happen if nobody paid attention? How would that make you feel? What would you do to make sure that your band has fans that will support it? How will you put a smile on the face of your coffeeshop customers as they get their morning latte and croissant? Don't leave the success of your project up to the whims of your marketplace. Lots of other projects are competing for the same xed pie of attention. Take control over the future success of your project by budgeting and planning to engage in promo activities as you begin. Stickers make these activities easier to visualize. Rather than some vague milestone of "launch our promo campaign", you can simply start by ordering a batch of stickers and seeing where those get you. By testing your imagery, message, and colors on stickers rst, you avoid wasting money on more expensive promo options until you have a "hit". You can also put your sticker design up on Twitter or your website for feedback from fans before even printing it.

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Spreading your logo on stickers takes the stress out of promo It can be really hard to break the ice with people. But doing so systematically is the key to getting your audience off the ground. Sure, you can publish your music to your hard drive and leave it there forever. It can be inherently satisfying to make music, to create a website, to bake the most delicious cakes in town. Your activities, when pursued to exacting quality standards, can generate a fan base on their own. You might play your music for friends in your living room, and they might demand that you bring them cd's, after which it magically gets heard by some hipster at Vice Magazine and your entire life becomes a rock 'n roll fantasy. I wish the best for you! Or, you can methodically meet people at parties and give stickers. They'll then visit your site, listen to your music, and start spreading the word for you. You can go to the ea market and spread stickers for your tumblr or cause or campaign. You can get out there and meet the market where it is congregating, rather than waiting for some act of social networking grace to propel you to the spotlight. If possible, go with your bandmates or cofounders to whip up more magnetic pull if you're meeting the people that could make you, you should have all hands on deck. Bring stickers: "you can't sh without bait." Perhaps you do not you want the spotlight, and perhaps you hold such concepts as fame in disdain. I, too, prefer leading a relatively private existence and do not yearn for attention. Still, I have come to realize that creative projects with insufcient attention paid to them by their relevant subcultures can only be characterized as hobbies. Level up turn your sticker jets on full blast It is critical that you invest in generating attention and catalyzing a critical mass. Once you have built a phenomenon of your project, your

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options will multiply substantially, and you won't have to sell your soul to an agent or the entertainment industry to get there. I'm denitely biased, but I believe that without custom vinyl stickers as part of your promo toolbox, you are missing the boat. Getting stickers out there is fun, social and easy compared to saving up your pennies to place ads in Google or cutting your prices to throw some Groupon special. Spreading stickers is like sowing seeds. People need to come to your bandcamp page if they are going to buy your music, right? Showing up at the club you want to play at every weekend with stickers for your own band will get your existence known to the people running the club fast. Bring stickers and use the popularity of other bands to build your own. Use your stickers to network with other bands and promoters and radio stations too. Musicians have long known the power of custom stickers, and all they have to do today is upload us a logo through our website to get started. This is 2012 and we have crafted a service that we believe will map onto your expectations of modern e-commerce while providing you the classic promo repower of custom stickers with your logo and design on them. Don't forget to include your website URL in your design - the synergy of stickers and the Web is a classic! Achieve awareness across the planet by spreading stickers You must take control of the destiny of your project through creating and implementing an effective promo strategy. Stickers are the easiest way to do this. Regularly spreading stickers through your potential audience will guarantee their awareness of your efforts. The unknown reaches of your projects potential can only be made manifest if it is enjoyed by an audience and ultimately gets you and your project the result it seeks: to exist as a serious cultural phenomenon within that audience. Mail stickers to everyone.
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Stickers are portable and delightful and classy way to convey a strong recommendation that a person that you might encounter should check out your project. Can you envision the perfect place to give away a bunch of stickers to drive awareness of what you're working on to the perfect potential fan base? Your stickers will even show up ambiently in photos if you put them up at clubs along with everybody else's stickers. Walls of stickers are prominent features of many hip nightspots and you or implicitly invited to slap up your logo too. All you need to do is place an order with us to dive in. Spreading stickers the right way can make people aware, curious, and interested with no work at all other then getting your art, address and payment to us through our website. Stickers, particularly short run stickers you designed yourself, almost spread themselves and you will learn to tap into an almost biological enthusiasm for human beings to customize their surroundings with stickers if you take into consideration the tips in this guide. The sooner you start, the better. When you give a sticker to someone, you get their full attention. You're offering them a free gift that cost you some money to create. Custom vinyl stickers are like invitations to a secret party that you are throwing on your website. Make sure everybody you want to attend gets a sticker. If you initiate the audience development, you'll see how exciting it is to gain new fans and customers from your direct contact with them in real life situations. Give a sticker for your band to that cute girl who works at Whole Foods and see what happens! :D Simply offering free stickers in your ads will bring people into your store. Printing custom stickers complements any strategy that you may currently be using to drive awareness. These promotions are easy to put on a calendar and operationalize so every month your sticker giveaways are a breeze.

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Promo can be a messy and multifaceted affair, and making the spread of custom logo stickers the core of your marketing activities lends them the focus and discipline missing from most promo campaigns and outts. I'd like your project to be equipped to succeed. Giving away stickers at your concerts or even the gigs of other bands that are like you will hit the target audience you seek, as nobody I have ever met at a concert can resist a free sticker given out by a new band. Show up at big show with 1000 stickers and it will be as if your band played. You will get people checking your music out as soon as they get home. I know, because that's exactly what I do ! The Cure If You're Obscure Why risk the disappointment of no audience for your hard creative efforts? If you believe something, and that drives your commitment to your project, articulate that dream and vision and spread that message prominently instead of just your logo. Your goal is to get others to identify strongly with the sticker you are giving them. The more they identify, the more they will want to learn more online and spread awareness of you. A really funny slogan on your sticker will get it put on car bumpers, not just tossed in a pile somewhere. Custom stickers provide you a brand-new type of blank canvas for your creativity, in addition to their inherent promotional repower. Be creative and condent. If you take risks with your design, you will stand out from the crowd. Be aware that the overall impression people will have of your project is inevitably linked to the rst impression you make with your stickers. Album cover art is important for musicians. Make artwork part of all of your creative projects, because people can get their minds around unique artwork easily and build memory associations that lead them

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to becoming your fan. Great ideas crave well-designed promotions, and often the people attracted to StickerNation are capable designers. If you are lacking those skills, use our text sticker tool and we will lay your message out for you, or tap your personal network to nd someone who can design and is willing to pitch in. I urge you to consider carefully the power of design to inject emotion and subcultural resonance into your project. Help people le your project psychologically in the folder in their brain labeled "learn more ASAP". Stickers do more than just attract attention. Stickers are persistent, like a tiny billboard that gets stuck on someone's refrigerator. Stickers continue to exist months or even years after they are stuck somewhere. In marketing terms, this is called "bang for your buck" thousands of people may lay their eyes upon your sticker over the course of its lifetime. Your stickers act like tiny landing pages, links spread through the real world that lead to your website. When someone puts the sticker that you give them of your project up, it's like they are posting a link to your site - a tacit endorsement in their apartment or on their guitar. The more attention they get for themselves, the more folks will see your sticker. Trading stickers is a fantastic way to convey scene solidarity. Bands small businesses and bloggers too should support one another, as they provide together a powerful counterpoint to the dominant corporate culture. What are your promo goals? What promo goals do you hope to accomplish? Don't be realistic. I encourage you to shoot for the moon. Why shouldn't your bakery be written about in an airline magazine? Why shouldn't your high school musical be a phenomenon that catapults the leads into performance careers? Why shouldn't your project be a hit? Isn't it awesome?

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All of these forms of success become par for the course after you have assembled an inuential enough audience. Think of each person you give a sticker to as another link as you try to set off a chain reaction across society. You need critical mass so assemble it one person at a time, since each link must be a loyal, spread-the-word fan to trigger the tipping point. At the tipping point, an entire tribe falls in love. Giving out stickers at a conference or show is an intimate way of meeting people, more promotional and effective then simply handing out business cards or yers. Vinyl stickers are psychological triggers that convey value instantly. After all, if your project was worth printing stickers for, it's probably worth checking out, right? Do you want more people to come into your hipster boutique? Would you like more energy to emanate from your student group? Would you like everybody at your birthday party to walk away with your stickers to build your cred as a street artist around town? Exactly who are you trying to impress? What do you want them to do? Check out your website, tell their friends about your store, bring their cousin to church? People behave inertially, like balls on a pool table. You want your sticker to impact their situation in such a way that they grow curious about what it is you do. Give people a nudge. The more carefully you can dene the behavioral modication you're after, the better informed your task of sticker and website design will be. It is hard to bring people to your website without handing them something tangible, and stickers are the perfect vehicle for this exchange. Don't be at your next event without making stickers rst! Where can you nd the people you want to reach with your project? Do they all congregate at a convention or a club? Are there online forums which would be open to you offering free stickers?

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If you are creative with distributing your stickers, you can whip up a frenzy of enthusiasm among your friends or customers. How to use stickers to delight your audience Can printing custom stickers actually help you get more people aware of your project? People love to augment identity with cool new stuff. Have you heard of this service called foursquare? Foursquare users "check in" to various locations around the planet to "achieve badges" or something like that. Personally, I don't use foursquare, but you get the idea. People are crazy for badges and feel like they have earned something when they get them. We sport badges to form our identity. Custom stickers are badges that you can print in order to leverage this facet of human nature. People collect stickers, as well they should they are unique works of art that rarely are mass produced. When I was growing up we didn't have stickers as a phenomenon that the kids could access, so I collected stamps instead. Punk rock led to a proliferation of zany stickers and I created StickerNation to help everybody access the phenomenal power of custom vinyl stickers. After a few runs of spreading stickers, you will be shocked at the level of awareness and engagement you will be able to achieve. We've helped bands, blogs, bakeries, businesses and Burning Man camps use custom stickers to delight and grow their audiences, so consider deploying stickers to achieve success with building a fan base. First, what are custom vinyl stickers? Vinyl bumper stickers have been since the 70s a perennial feature of American automotive life. Over the last two decades, stickers began popping up elsewhere on guitars, refrigerators, and high school lockers. People customized their car bumpers with slogans and jokes

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meant to invade the space of other cars, an act of creative passive aggression that served as a forerunner to today's Tweets and Likes. For decades, it was hard to nd a printer for stickers. Unlike T-shirts, which were relatively easy to print, custom vinyl stickers required heavy duty inks, elaborate set up, and the skills of layout that only began to proliferate after the advent of desktop publishing. Adobe Illustrator gave thousands the tools of vector illustration that when combined with the art of screenprinting and the heavy-duty platform of sticky vinyl yielded powerful synergy. The rst outts to take advantage of this were the punk rock bands of the very early 90s, whose logos festooned my guitar and amplier at school when I was trying to emulate Kurt Cobain. (No recess!) I began printing stickers for my own ideas, partially because I felt that stickers were cool. This was back in 1994. Since that time, I got excited about the access that I carefully built to great sticker printing resources, and decided to start printing for other people in 1999. I quickly discovered that people of all walks of life were interested in harnessing the power of stickers to move the needle for awareness of their projects. By printing custom stickers, every job we did resulted in a unique, limited edition work of art, and bolstered our own unique collection of stickers. We've printed for all kinds of projects. Custom vinyl stickers are not: 1) Individual, one off stickers they are meant to be given away or sold, not just for your own personal identity but for purposes of spreading an image or a icon through a local idea ecosystem 2) Throwaways, like most paper products expect your stickers to hang around for a while, particularly if you give them to people who already love what you do, to ambiently promote you
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3) Meant to be very large our standard size, for instance, is around 14 in., which is height times width - ideal for stashing in your wallet or back pocket for distributing at the next street fair or gig Print stickers rather than printing T-shirts or yers Stickers are way cheaper than T-shirts. If nobody buys your T-shirts, you're stuck with a large loss of money. When people watch your show live, that doesn't necessarily mean they want to walk out with a bit of fashion. Stickers are way easier to handle than T-shirts, and if you want you can sell them for $2 even though they cost only 60 each to make or less. Everybody jumps for free stickers, too, of course. Stickers should probably even be created before your band releases the CD, because they're so cheap and fast compared to the elaborate layout and mastering tasks that must precede having a solid CD in your hands. Web startups and app developers can give away stickers to tantalize bloggers and convention attendees well before launch, or give out stickers to power users so they can invite more people to join. Here's what you need to know: 1) Stickers are easier to spread then anything printed on paper because people want stickers and will often throw away iers, postcards, or haphazardly distributed business cards 2) People want aesthetic beauty and/or words of wisdom, not just a marketing message, so put some soul into your design 3) Make sure your art is at least 200 dpi or vector (go Illustrator!) 4) Parties and events are the best ways to get a bunch of stickers out fast to the right crowd

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Stickers operate on a subliminal wavelength. If your stickers are posted in public spaces, they act like tiny broadcast stations that being your project logo to only those attuned to this wavelength. In many urban areas, the "sticker wavelength" represents a constant stream of subcultural communication. The good news is that you don't have to litter to make a big impact with stickers. Stickers work best when given to people, not just slapped up People will place your stickers on their own surfaces, the ultimate endorsement of your project.You should be after the ambient recommendation that such a "personal placement" represents. Custom stickers are not just a fad. When very high prole projects begin spreading stickers to attune their environment towards paying attention to them, it's a promo tactic worth closer examination. Intimacy is a core advantage of small projects. Big brands that advertise on television or in newspapers do so because of the difculty they face presenting their inane ideas in intimate settings. Giving out stickers personally is something only a small project person can do. I want to empower small projects, as I view them as the repository of true quality and craftsmanship today. Every furniture artist can use custom vinyl stickers to draw people to their website and instill in them a vision of someday owning custom built furniture. The advantage for consumers who are offered the option of small producers is that they no longer have to remain ignorant of the high-quality alternatives that are made by projects like yours. Big corporations mass market. Beat them on the ground. Three big advantages to custom vinyl stickers to promote: 1) Vinyl stickers are perceived as a gift: an opportunity for your recipient to decorate something their own way
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2) Paper gets thrown out or ignored, but usually I stick the sticker up somewhere; you control who gets one (precision targeting) 3) If you do nothing but connect electronically, you might forget to follow up the sticker is persistent and accomplishes follow-up awareness for you - a great way to thank mail-order customers Don't pass up opportunities to expand your audience when you are out at an event.You never know when you might run across somebody who would really love what you do and wants to work with you. Having custom vinyl stickers in your pocket beats just giving them a business card or getting their email address. How to win friends and inuence people without even talking I have found that my custom vinyl stickers have been a great way for me to connect on a more personal level with people I run across at parties and concerts. I use them to break the ice, not forcing people to have to endure me talking about my project but summarizing it in a cool way so they can follow up and nd out more by checking out the URL that I always lay out on the bottom right of my sticker design. It's hard to quantify the impact of a sticker campaign.You won't get statistics for how many people see your stickers, for instance but you can track the number of stickers that you have given out or otherwise deployed. Stickers are part of a complete promo toolkit. Imagine what giving out vinyl stickers of your logo pointing people to your website could do for the prole of your project. With an enhanced cultural prole, your project will attract the attention and perhaps even the funding that it requires to get to the next level. Providing stickers to your audience translates into more excitement, and in the long-term, custom vinyl stickers helps drive fans, who will spread your project by word-of-mouth; not just people who will buy
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but people who will adore you just a little bit for giving them something unexpected and cool that you made yourself. I have personally connected with thousands of people I otherwise wouldn't have, and they have warmly supported me for many years with their attention. I've set my stickers to the task of promoting my website, where I sell a range of T-shirts. I can afford to give away the stickers because I want to drive more trafc to my website. The only kind of advertising that people actually like The stickers cost money they aren't free, even to me which makes this an advertising spend. But stickers are so well targeted that they're a no-brainer. Stickers are way cheaper than T-shirts and still make a more deluxe, lasting impression on the people that I really want to check out my music or website or T-shirts than yers. Advertising intimidates many people who are just starting to create with their projects. Don't be shy. Consider advertising as an inherent part of your project. The more creative you are, the more you will want to control your own advertising, no matter how successful your project gets. Developing a core competency in describing and articulating your project value in image and text will help you maintain control over time as well as build your audience faster now. I think of it as evangelism, more than advertising. Like any creative, I have faith in my creation and believe it is valuable. But value is in the eye of the beholder, and unless my creation is beheld, its value dissipates. It falls to me to take responsibility for introducing my creative work to others in a casual, effective and friendly way. Every sticker we print is an act of faith, and faith emanates from stickers because it is clear that someone felt the message or image on it was important enough for investment. Have faith in your genius!

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Whoever said "ignorance is bliss" was hopefully being sarcastic Don't let your tree fall in the forest with nobody there to hear. Attract other people to share joy in the output of your creative effort. If you leave the promotion of your project up to chance, you risk low social awareness of its amazing value. If you are counting on word-of-mouth to spread awareness of your project, turbocharge word-of-mouth with custom vinyl stickers. People will return the favor by talking you up. A great sticker can hijack the attention of anyone who notices it for a second. Seeing your sticker several times can yield the multiple impressions that it takes to really get someone to pay attention to your project at all. The word "hijacking" can seem sinister to the uninitiated. This is where faith in the value of your project comes in. If you aren't that good yet, perhaps printing stickers is premature. However, I believe that if you print stickers that look amazing, you will improve to the level of those stickers quickly. Printing stickers and giving them out is an act of condence in yourself, your team, and what you have made or offer. When your stickers show up in the mail, you will get this emotional rush your project, which perhaps was just you and a guitar in your living room, is suddenly real and ready for the world. Your stickers will signal that you're better than most. Stickers promised in an email blast can ll seats at your next event. Because they are easy to pass out and inexpensive to produce in bulk, stickers are a fantastic way to let people express that "they were there". Conferences give out stickers to attendees to grow awareness and make nonattendees jealous. They're great at parties too. Attention is like the sunlight without which your project may wither. The attention of others is vital for your success. How annoying, right? But it is true with an audience, creating is way more fun.

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Stickers seem to access the subconscious Couples getting married often print vinyl stickers with us for their guests to treasure as keepsakes. Stickers are a way of placing a virtual "bookmark" in the environment of those you endeavor to reach. Memory is malleable if you deploy such bookmarks in the social surroundings of your desired audience, or "scene". When walking around Hollywood, I run across stickers all over the place. The streets are an art gallery in my neighborhood. The stickers I see can be beautiful, shocking, or mundane but each reects a soul of mischief, reminding me of the creativity bubbling under this ne city. Messages on stickers slide into my consciousness because I am attuned to the "sticker wavelength" that eludes squares but drives curiosity among the right people. Secret symbolic interchanges make urban life a frenzied, glorious exploration of collective humanity. Every brand on TV is an attempt to manipulate the audience into focusing attention where they otherwise wouldn't. You may feel guilty that you are engaging in a parallel practice, but consider wouldn't it be better for people to discover your creative output than to watch yet another terrible television drama? No coercion is involved in your pitch to hijack their curiosity. If your sticker does not generate interest in the recipient, they are of course free to ignore it. You need to feel condent that your project is worthy of attention, at least to those to whom you give your stickers. Things do get discovered on the Internet by random surfers, sure, but why wait when stickers can act like a magnet to attract them now? Heed the economics of attention Just as there is an economics of money, there is an economics of attention. Attention, like money, is not a game everybody can win.

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Of course if you have big money you can spend it any way you choose. But stickers as the fuel of your promo efforts is still the efcient way. You need to connect with emotions and trigger reciprocity by giving small free gifts or samples to a huge number of people of whom perhaps only a few will care. Focus on other people and what they want or need or dream about, not what you want to sell them. Achieve a t between your product and the audience you'd like to serve. Help people FEEL the way they want to feel. Entice them by stimulating their emotions. Consider in advance exactly what you want to achieve during your next interpersonal opportunity, how you are going to do that, how you will respond to questions or concerns, and exactly when you will stop talking. Preparation is essential. Control the outcome of your sticker campaign by envisioning exactly how you plan to deploy them. You can't control much in this world, but you can plan to spread a given quantity of stickers at certain specied locations to specic types of people in a short timeframe. Rally your team to pitch in, because stickers provide a focus for promotional teamwork, making the critical task of promo a piece of cake and fun too. This is what rock'n'roll is all about! Select success as your destiny. Success means people paying attention to your creative output, and getting paid for the excitement that you and your ideas are able to whip up. You will achieve success, if you do a good job on your project and promote it properly. Some people can promote by getting discovered by some major-label talent scout. Most of those, too, have to earn every scrap of attention. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Stickers are a fantastic way to get started with promo. They're easy, fun, inexpensive and clearly convey the value and aesthetics of your

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project in a fun and clever package. Everybody who puts your sticker up looks like a fan of your project, even if they haven't checked it out yet! When someone puts your sticker on their car or guitar, this intimate endorsement can make their friends aware of you. No other object you can give people packs such a powerful potential promo punch. Stickers will make the once mundane duty of promo a joy. Really work on your sticker design. If you put time and care into making sure your stickers are aesthetically appealing, they could take a life of their own. Everybody wants cool stickers. If you start with an attitude of helping other people decorate things, you can control your destiny because people will do the work of spreading your ideas for you assuming you print enough stickers. Skill and craft put into design pay off when people associate the precision of your sticker artwork with the quality of the output of your project. We've got to stick together Giving stickers to people is a great way to kick off a relationship with them that could extend over many years as long as you have creative energy to pump out, your fans will stick with you if you initiate your relationship with a cool gift like a sticker. You should try giving if you want to receive. Reciprocity is the core of relationships, and relationships with people are the most important output of your project. Let your stickers be an ambassador for the awesome experience you have in store for the people you meet. Get obsessed with building relationships with the people who can make you successful. Every single potential fan could be able to spread word of your project nationwide. Stickers don't just get thrown away they get stuck up somewhere, a perpetual reminder of the cool stuff that you offer through your project. Work on your website too.

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Giving someone a sticker shows them that you care what they think. Human nature dictates that they will care for you and your project in return. We are social beings and we hate being alone. Stickers help you bond with your scene. The glue that makes stickers stick helps us humans stick together too. And the people who get your stickers form an in-group that binds them together apart from outsiders like a cult. You have invested a lot into gear and time to make cool stuff happen. Stickers give you a way to promote that ranks up there with the ease of use of a well-crafted musical instrument. Your stickers are an extension of you. You are what you print on stickers. Stickers give you a way to show off your creative soul. There is no accounting for the joy that you'll feel when people nd you giving away the cool stickers you designed. It always inspires me to do my best to deliver even more value on my websites - to match the excitement people exhibit when I give them stickers. Delivering your art is rewarding. And when people see your stickers everywhere you become a "phenomenon", a mental landmark worthy of tribal consciousness. Like it or not, we are affected by celebrity culture, and stickers can create a micro celebrity out of your project. Like gravitational pull, giving away stickers creates a social attention-energy swirl around your project. Become a cultural touchstone with your sticker design. Bands that promote are clearly "better" than bands who just wait and watch while others get the gigs and light up the Internet. This doesn't mean the music is better, but they're better at promoting, and promoting is part of independence. Other bands shouldn't have a tool that you lack. Giving out stickers implies a condence that presupposes that people who get the stickers will dig the experience laid out for them at the website. This condence breeds respect. Everyone knows stickers cost money. Unlike cheap paper, stickers convey prestige and are a step up from business cards when in the
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promotional battleground of the mediasphere. If you show up with stickers and everybody else doesn't, you will be able to make a serious impact on the people there. Stickers impress others, every time. Stickers are highly visible. You can add a visual element to your music through a clever sticker design. Your website logo is a work of art, so hit the streets with it. Your church group wants to evangelize in a clever new way that will get words of spiritual insight through the strange media ecosystem modern man inhabits. Stickers cut right through, particularly when they are giving out personally with a smile. Spreading stickers for your project together is a lot of fun. All custom stickers are inherently limited edition. Your stickers will only be spread to the chosen few. It's a lot of fun to visualize the proper spread of your idea, and stickers give you a concrete tactic for enhancing this spread. Your stickers are highly visible, not something that is tucked away in a newspaper that nobody reads anymore. You should aspire to be a phenomenon. Stickers can help. Your aesthetics are highly rened. You're a creative person who has a unique style from which others can draw inspiration. You're doing the world a favor by sharing your visual expression on vinyl stickers that people can treasure and use to customize their surroundings. Unleashing your artwork on stickers will lend it a sense of superiority that will delight your friends and vex your rivals. Get your art up! If you don't invest in your design, you're letting it gather dust instead of conquer hearts. Our world is altered only through the efforts of creative people. Stickers are an atomic form of creativity they're so very basic, and yet they are the easiest way to turn any artwork into something valuable, something worth two dollars if it is funny or beautiful. When you give stickers away, you are simultaneously promoting your own project while giving out a cool, personal gift.
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Thank your customers with neat stickers with every purchase, and watch your coffee shop become a popular ritual for your community. Only the small businesses that harness such creative, almost subversive means of promo will slip through the cracks of commoditized mass manufacturing, advertising and culture. After you place your order, you will immediately feel the excitement and anticipation while we take your artwork and lay it out for the press. When your stickers arrive, you'll feel the power of your investment in your hands. Nobody else will have these stickers you're in complete control of who gets them. These unique items will drive the popularity of your project to where you want to go. This is what you'll achieve by having custom stickers printed: 1) You'll have something to grab on the way out of the door with which you can spread the word either ambiently or aggressively 2) You'll have something cool to put in your mailings and lay out at the coffee shop across the street to nd clients or fans locally 3) Your friends and even strangers will ask you for them - it's cool! 4) You won't kick yourself at gatherings and conferences because you forgot to bring something cool to promote your project with 5) You'll be able to trade stickers with a worldwide network of artists if you so choose, and conveniently share your art with friends 6) You'll be able to put a smile on the face of anyone who buys your products at retail, through mail order, or at a live event 7) You'll be able to put a tool for amplifying awareness of your project in the hands of your most excited fans, parishioners, or users

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8) You will execute a creative design that adds a powerful aesthetic dimension to your project heretofore unexpressed 9) Spreading the word about your ideas has never been so much fun 10) Maybe the people you give stickers to will spread word further Get curious about discovering the potential of your project What if you are the greatest new blog mankind has ever seen? I don't want to see you toil in unnecessary obscurity for much longer. Creative people are always on the lookout for new ways to spread word of what they have done. Stickers accomplish this task efciently. Stickers are a new way to solve an old problem how to get people to discover your output. By discovering yourself the potential of custom vinyl stickers to drive interest in what you do, you will embrace a unique strategy for sculpting the attention of your chunk of society. Only you will own these stickers a unique expression of who you are. Rather than being subject to the judgments of others, dene your own identity through a quick sticker campaign for your newest creative effort. By introducing your original project, you will uncover at last the secret of improved attention tactics for guiding your team to the success it deserves. Stickers help others discover what you do. Enjoying the pleasure of an audience can make you a much more effective creative. Knowing that people are excited to meet you and consider your opinions will transform your social interactions. Having stickers on hand at social affairs is a great way to start conversations and make new contacts that can help you in oblique ways. Letting them in on your secret project in this very personal way makes people feel exclusive and smart. That's a win/win.

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It is unknown what your project can accomplish with proper promotion. The sky is the limit. There are many ways to promote your project, and the very best way is probably through making sure your output is top quality as far as you are concerned. But building a tiny bit of promotional karma into your origins as a project can sow seeds for bountiful harvest of attention and inuence as you progress. Stickers, word of mouth and design As new project perhaps without many existing fans or friends, you may be relying on your social network of sympathetic contacts, neighbors, and people you know from events and the Web. Schedule a time to meet with everyone on your team to discuss promo strategy. If you already have fans, customers, or users, consider printing enough stickers to mail several to each. Word of mouth is commonly understood as the highest form of endorsement, and stickers can facilitate its power through giving people the opportunity to advocate for the awesomeness of your output. We change the future together. While designing your stickers, keep in mind that you are you trying to distill the essence of why someone ought to get curious about your project. There are several strategies to convey the core on stickers: 1) Straightforward and professional - your sticker simply states what you do, or conveys your logo and the URL - a perennial favorite 2) Artistic a ne way to grab attention and make sure your stickers are highly valued when you're passing them out 3) Statement oriented where you are trying to get across a phrase and have your project as a subtle tagline 4) Photographic our sticker press can handle photos, and you can lay words over the photos for added articulation
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Invite your team and even your fans to contribute ideas and designs. If they feel buy-in early on during the design phase, they will pitch and more passionately when it's time to spread the stickers around the scene. Again, think of it like you are passing out party invitations. Invite your friends to come by your website and leave a comment Facebook is particularly powerful as a platform for encouraging this kind of viral endorsement. Identify among your network people that would pitch in fully during your sticker campaign. These allies can make you immune to concerns about coming across as overly selfpromotional. It can become lonely pitching your own project solo. Collect people who might help you spread your stickers further than your own social circle. Mail stickers all over the country to make a splash in remote regions. Do this with force after you have printed up a small run to make sure your stickers are having the desired behavioral impact. Are people you are giving your stickers to reacting with curiosity and the light? If so, do your best to accelerate your campaign because you could trigger a tipping point. Stated simply, a tipping point is when your project becomes a phenomenon. Suddenly, a large group of people (a "tribe"), linked by common interest or need, discovers and standardizes on your output. A tribe of Brooklyn hipsters begins recommending your music, or your restaurant is mobbed with diners. It occurs in specic situations, and once achieved, forms of foundation for all kinds of future fun. Their help will lend your product credibility you don't tell your friends about something unless they think it is for their friend's own good. Get others to publicize you. Stickers can help you reach a tipping point in any tribe if deployed with solid strategy. You want each of your fans to bring three more people into your circle. You have a powerful network built up and stickers make it

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sizzle with synergy behind your project. If you give stickers to your network, they'll build your phenomenon with you and each other. Building up your fan base organically like this makes you indispensable to it, because they will be invested in your success and tuned in to your future output - part of your own tribe, as it were, with your project dening its membership and rituals. A congregation or a class can be electried into an force through the power of custom stickers. If you are an activist, clearly a pile of custom vinyl stickers to support your cause or protest something awful makes sense. Get into an action frame of mind If you had printed stickers for your project six months ago, where would you be now? Wouldn't those stickers be pointing more people to you today? I can't believe how much time I wasted before grabbing the bull by the horns and printing stickers with my ideas. Once I got started, personally, I never stopped! The fact that you are reading this guide probably indicates that you have never printed custom stickers before. I want to welcome you to my world! The power to turn your ideas into a stack of cool stickers that people will really want is intensely gratifying. Almost no matter what is printed on your stickers, people will be attracted to them and ask you for them. If you design your stickers with aesthetics in mind, you'll nd your stickers cropping up all over the place without much effort at all. Stickers are a win/win for you and your fans alike, the only type of advertising people enjoy. People enjoy advertising tiny projects. It makes them look like they are in on something when they can sport a sticker that supports your band or small business or blog. Most web oriented projects have little tangibility, making it difcult to engage in guerrilla marketing.

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Escape the virtual world with your promo. If you need attention, invade the real world with custom vinyl stickers that point people to your wonderful website. So give people the opportunity to promote you! Indeed, they're all looking for cool new stuff to share right now: 1) it makes them look hip for knowing about something obscure 2) It lets them put your logo in the proximity of their friends 3) If the sticker is rad, it'll make something they own look cool 4) Every time they see your sticker, they might think about your project it's like having a tiny billboard in their house For those about to print custom vinyl stickers, we salute you This was a lot of fun to create, because I truly believe in the power of our independent creativity to transform the world. I hope you do too. The balance of power in the culture must shift. I believe that independent projects must promote independently as well, rather than waiting for the media to pick up on them spontaneously. Take a second to consider what a really enthusiastic crowd of engaged audience members or customers would do for your life. Your creativity should be in the spotlight. Your power to transform raw materials into something timeless is what being human is all about. You've been denied the tools to advertise your project properly on a human to human level for too long. Let's get your vision on vinyl. Your independence is the core value of StickerNation. Your freedom to create on a blank canvas is precious, as is the creativity you have already executed. We are here to help you draw attention to it. By empowering you to promote, we are doing what we can to tilt the balance of attention back in favor of independent projects like yours.
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