Creating a Mini One-Sheet

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine from Toastmasters invited me to a local small business group mixer. The meeting was to be held at a small wine bar in town, and would be a great way to meet fellow entrepreneurs and business people. She said in passing, be sure to bring lots of business cards and some information on your business.

Wow, I thought to myself, I have business cards but I don’t really have anything about my speaking business that I could share with someone. Since there are hundreds of people in this organization, I knew there would be a lot of opportunities to promote myself… but how?

I needed something that I could share with people in a small, informal setting, that would let them know what I speak about and have contact information. My business cards were informative, but they had very limited information, even though they were double sided. I needed something more.

I thought about speaker Sheryl Roush, and her popular full page one-sheets, that she has helped hundreds of speakers create. While this sounded like a great tool, a full 8.5 x 11 sheet would be a little overkill in a small restaurant setting. I needed something I could put in my pocket.

As the day approached I looked at different options, but nothing seemed to resonate. I asked myself… how do other people promote themselves? I looked around my office for some ideas. As I looked down, it hit me. There, sitting on my desk, was a postcard from a writing friend of mine, with all of her business information in a handy 4 x 6 card. Voila… I’ll create a mini one-sheet template. The perfect solution.

Unfortunately, I only had a day until the event. Not enough time to get cards printed by a traditional publisher. I was frustrated and thought about printing them out on my inkjet printer. While this was a workable solution, I remembered that I needed a couple of colors of ink for the printer. At $14 apiece for the cartridges, these simple cards were suddenly going to get very expensive.

I was really getting frustrated now. The perfect opportunity would surely pass me by… there just had to be a way to do this. I looked down again, and believe it or not, the perfect answer was staring me in the face. Right there, on my desk, was a package of photos from Costco.

Here was the answer I was looking for. It might actually work. If I could create a ”photo” with the information that I needed on it, I could get it printed in less that an hour at Costco. I fired up Photoshop, created a 4 x 6 inch graphic at 300 dpi, and started creating.

Within minutes, I had a framework setup. I put my logo at the top, and put my three top speaking topics below. I kept it simple, using black, red, and grey as my colors, and using a nice clear sans serif font for the text. In under an hour, my mini-one-sheet was ready to go. I saved it as a Tiff and also as a JPEG, not knowing for sure what format Costco would take. I saved the 300dpi picture to a USB stick and also a SD card used in cameras.

The next night, after work, I took my photo to Costco, and inserted the memory card into their machine. My “one-sheet template” showed up on their screen and I ordered 20 cards as a test. I did some shopping and came back 45 minutes later to pick up my photos… I wondered…

Would the text be sharp?

Would the colors look good?

Would the photos work as a marketing tool?

Costco charged 13 cents apiece for the edge to edge glossy prints so the whole total for my marketing efforts came to a whopping $2.60.

I was apprehensive…

I slowly opened the envelope… arrghh, I thought… would they be formatted properly…

As I pulled back the flap, my beautiful marketing materials shined under the bright fluorescent lights. I pulled out the prints.

YES… they looked incredible.

YES… they fit in my back pocket

YES… they had all my information on them.

I headed out to the mixer with my new marketing prints ready to go. It turned out to be a rather large group in a small setting. As I met new people, they would hand me a business card, and I would hand them a print. Almost everyone was impressed with the glossy, bright and colorful “photo” cards. Many people asked me about them.

For two dollars and sixty cents, these were by far the best marketing materials I had ever created. The edge to edge printing made them look awesome! Costco had come through!