Advertise to your friends and family with custom postage stamps

postage stamp ad

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can advertise more publicly for our goals since seeing all of the highway signs I wrote about in Road trip: Adopt a highway.

I’ve been experimenting with wearing a T-shirt that has a picture of a hike I want to do in a couple of years, and have found that it’s a great way to prompt others to ask me about that goal. I also use my refrigerator for public advertising at home. (Note of caution to significant others…that works! 🙂 )

Alerting the people around you to your goals has many positive benefits:

  • Someone else now holds the idea of you doing this thing in their mind, in addition to you.
  • They are likely to ask you about it, which gives you an opportunity to talk about your goal.
  • It creates the opportunity for them to inform you about resources they know about and offer other forms of support.
  • It activates the psychological principle of consistency.

Postage stamps with a custom picture on them are a great way to activate all of these benefits, especially at a time of year when many of us correspond with people we care about, and who care about us. (Sorry I’m telling you about this a little too late to implement the idea on your holiday cards, but what if you sent out your thank you notes stamped with a picture of you doing your #1 goal for 2008?)

Where to get custom stamps

Here are a couple of the most popular places to order custom postage stamps online:

PhotoStamps

PhotoStamps – has very clean, easy interface. Upload a photo from your computer and use online tools to rotate, zoom and add whimsical borders.

The stamps are a little expensive – at 84 cents each (for 40 or more) they are a little over twice the price of a normal first class stamp – but depending on your goal the opportunity to advertise about it to everyone you know may be a bargain.

Zazzle

Zazzle – If you have a Flickr account, Zazzle is the way to go. Zazzle will put photos from your Flickr account on stamps and all kinds of other useful schwag. It can also upload a photo directly from your computer, if you prefer.

Once you’ve chosen a photo you can add a text message to it, with lots of options for changing font, size, alignment, etc. This is a great opportunity to add a headline – especially one that uses the kind of powerful persuasive language I described in Punch up your headline with Phrases that Sell. The photo above is the same one I used to develop the ad in Write a headline for your cell phone ad, with the addition of a better headline.

Prices are a little better at Zazzle – as little as 14.95 for one sheet of 20 first class stamps (74 cents each), a couple of bucks less per sheet if you buy more. They also have free shipping with if you order 3 sheets or more.

What picture should I put on the stamps?

Any goal that it would be helpful to have the people around you believing in along with you is a good candidate for your stamps: a trip, a challenging adventure, a graduation, a marathon, a home, a job, an RV.

Ideally the image will be a picture with you in it, already living your #1 goal. See the Put yourself in the picture series for some great tips about how create a photo of yourself inhabiting your future reality now. Seeing yourself already doing it is powerful stuff, all the more so when you invite others to join you in that vision!

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