Mention marketing these days, and most people assume you’re talking about AdWords, pagerank, search engine optimization, and so on. One thing that doesn’t come to mind when you think about marketing is postcards.

In fact, they are one of the best ways for both professional and amateur photographers to market themselves and sell some photos. Postcards have always been a very effective way of promoting photographers’ products and skills, and they’re also an opportunity to land new gigs. Today’s postcards make both those uses even easier.

What can Moo do for you?

It all starts with Moo. There’s nothing particularly outrageous about them but their mini-cards are a very neat version of business cards while their note cards are hard to miss.

Moo has partnered with Flickr and Fotolia to make it incredibly easy to use your own images on your cards and for buyers to pay to use your images on their cards.

So how can you make money with Moo?

The easiest method is simply to create boxes of cards (or stickers) and sell them. When Moo made its deal with Fotolia, they went for boxes of four pre-selected subjects: flowers, skies, puppies and kittens.

They chose the four themes based on what they perceived to be the most marketable.

Julie Wohlberg of Fotolia told us. (Who’d have though skies would be so popular?) That’s just four topics though, so how about creating some of your own? If puppies sell, maybe rabbits will too. Or beaches. Or cars. Or babies. Or anything else you’ve got hidden on your hard drive. Put a box together then put them in front of punters.

More interestingly, Julie also added that:

Moo users can… link to Fotolia to license images for packs that they design themselves.

You can create packs of cards, print them with Moo and sell them for a profit through stores or your own website. Or you can even put images on Fotolia and send buyers from your website to the micro-stock site so that they can create their own card packs using your images.

Of course, you could even go door-to-door around local businesses with card samples and ask the owners if they’d like some for their companies. You could create a box full of food images, for example, tour local restaurants and suggest that you could photograph their dishes and leave space for the restaurant’s name and phone number. That would be hard work, but who said marketing was easy?

ModernPostcard.com — Direct Mail Marketing Today

More traditional than Moo is ModernPostcard.com. In some ways, this is good, old-fashioned direct mail marketing. The simplest thing to do is to put your images on the cards, toss in some catchy sales copy, select a geographic region and demographic, then ask ModernPostcard to send the cards out.

That will cost you money but one or two extra wedding gigs is likely to be enough to cover the cost.

The geo-targeting would even make it very easy to make your images match your sales location. A wedding photographer, for example, could be sure to use local landmarks in the couple shots.

Alternatively, you could offer the service yourself to other business owners. You could set yourself up as a direct marketing business, outsourcing everything to ModernPostcard but the images that appear on the cards. Those would be exclusive and cost a premium. As far as the client is concerned, they’re getting a one-stop marketing shop. As far as you’re concerned, you’re just selling photos.

Online advertising might be attracting all the attention these days, but there’s still plenty of life left in postcards; and plenty of money too.

Read more about Moo here and here.