;-) Attention! Contains some referral links! ;-)

Some weeks ago I was contacted by this people: printbusinesscards.com and after thinking quite a while about and asking some more questions I decided to give it a try because I noticed it might be a good possibility to promote my portfolio to other markets/ buyers. So what it is about? First of all joining is free, you then start to design templates for business cards (Stock images make great templates for business cards as we are hopefully used to design/ shoot with copy-space in mind!)and put them on line. Customers can then buy business cards with your design, but not the file itself!, from  printbusinesscards.com.
You get $5 per (first) sale/ customer, if the SAME customer comes back and buys the same card again you get nothing ;-( .
Minimum pay out is 25$. You retain the copyright and the image is non-exclusive to them, means it is an additional outlet for your work and you don't have to put up exclusive work there.

And now the interesting part, if you have min 12 templates submitted they set up a mini-site for you with links to your web site, blog or portfolio, here is mine: My Mini Site
The other great thing is that you can link each template to the original image you have with a stock agency like FeaturePics! So if somebody wants not only the business cards with your design but also the image to put it for exemple on their web page s/he can buy it from your portfolio at FeaturePics (and becomes your referral at FeaturePics also!). More sales for you! I think that is a very clever idea to promote your portfolio to other markets. I have choosen to link to FeaturePics because of the high percentage you get there of each sale and the possibility that each of YOUR images serves as a referral link for you, but you can equally link the template to an other site that allows per image sales, your own home page etc.
Only draw back for me, they don�t have a decent referral programme! At least not one that uses tracking cookies, ;-( nethertheless if you invite somebody to join and forward the name to them you get $25 as soon as this person has 25 templates approved! This referral programme is only valid until the end of this month (May). So if anybody wants to join I would be very grateful if you pm me or respond to this thread as soon as you signed up. ;-) In exchange I volunteer to answer your questions, provided I know the answer! SY

My mini-site went yesterday on line so I don't think I'll have any sales this week  But on their forum is a thread where you can see what got bought recently.  SY

How has this been working out for you so far?  Does it seem promising, or too soon to tell?

What do you mean with spamming? I exchanged emails with them prior to joining and let's say they where very interested that I join and keep animating me by answering questions etc. but I didn't got a spam mail from them in the sense of "please buy our products". If you want I can pm you Tim's email and you can write him about this. It seems odd to me that this happens especially as they put a lot of emphasis on their non-spamming and privacy policy, SY

Hello kosmikkreeper,

I registered simply so I could respond to your post. I am Tim and I am not spamming anyone. I am sorry you perceive our program as 'spam.' It seems that the term spam has grown in it's obtuse definition to fit anything people don't care for these days. Anyhow, I digress...

I don't recall who exactly you are. I don't know if you registered on our site or not. If you did tell me to remove you from our contact list and it did not happen for some reason; then I sincerely apologize. However, I need to find out who you are so that I can ensure you don't continue to be contacted for some odd reason. I'm also curious why you would continue to be contacted 'every week' as you suggest. We only started sending out targeted invitations again this past week after taking a hiatus of almost one month.

Whatever the problem is here, I'd like a chance to rectify it. I don't want our company being accused of spamming anyone. You were initially contacted purely on the quality of your artistic work. You weren't 'mass emailed'. Quite honestly, it would have been alot simpler to mass email thousands of artists...but that's not how we want to grow our site. We are targeting specific art and photographic genres.

Anyhow, please respond to me so that I can rectify your 'receiving emails every week.' I don't want you to perceive our program negatively, even if you don't care to join us.

Have a great day,

TimMc
Community Development Manager
newbielink:http://www.printbusinesscards.com [nonactive]

Hospitalera:
How do you link your picture to featurepics (or any other web site)?

Will the link at the bottom of your posts automatically sign me up as your referral if I choose to do this?

Thanks for the info.  I'm thinking about doing this...

Update: While I was on holidays I sold my first template!  SY

I use Photoshop, but if you type in cmyk or color space into the help of elements, I am sure you find the answer, in PS it is something like Image>Mode>CMYK. Hope that helps, SY