How To Save 80% On Your Printer Ink Replacement

[VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]

Do you want to know how to save over 80% on your ink cartridge expenses?

If you're like me, when you go to the store to buy a new set of ink cartridges, you're going:

For crying out loud! The ink cartridges are just as much as buying a new printer!

Well, if you feel that way, you are not alone.

What's going on everyone? I'm Brad Poirier with Bear City Impact.

I'm all about helping local businesses get the most out of their marketing.

So if you're new here, consider subscribing and hitting that bell button below.

Now, today's video is a little bit different than my regular marketing tip video. So as you may have known, I recently moved into a new office and in that said, new office. I had no printer.

So what do I do? I go on a little google’s and I start searching for printers.

I happen to be a fan of Hewlett-Packard printers and so I knew that that was the brand I wanted to get.

I settled on an office jet pro 6970 model. It was on sale for 100 bucks. It's great. I'll leave a link if you want to check out the exact model that I purchased.

Now, I worked about 12 or 14 years in retail business and at least five or six of those years was in some sort of computer technology and I sold a ton of print across all different brands.

One of the biggest complaints that I got from customers was the cost of ink cartridges.

So here I would be giving them a new printer, like 100 bucks and getting them a replacement set of ink cartridges ,that was like maybe 80 bucks.

So one would wonder, why don't I just get a whole new printer for the pop the same price?

Well it's not really reasonable to have to go and keep setting up new printers. Plus, the printers that you buy, they only come with a starter set of ink cartridges.

They're not completely full, but the replacement in cartridges are full. But they're just still just a lot of money.

One of the things that people have tried to do over the years to save costs on ink cartridges is a couple of things.

The first thing that I've seen people do over the years is they buy a third party in cartridge, so they're not original the printer model.

It is basically another company creating kind of a knockoff ink cartridge.

The second thing I've seen people do is they refill the cartridge.

Now by default, printer cartridges are not refillable, but they've made these kits over the years where you can basically squeeze ink into it and then refills the cartridge and by doing that on your own, you do save quite a bit of money.

The same problem exists with both of those solutions because you're not using the original manufacturers ink cartridge or you're altering it.

You're basically changing what you're doing to that ink cartridge. You don't get the same performance out of the ink cartridge.

You may have experienced this in the past where you use either a third party cartridge or you refill the cartridge and now you get a lot of ink blots or the ink jets start clogging the printhead

That's all a result of refilling the cartridges or using a third party cartridge.

I'm going to show you how I'm now going to save almost 80% on my ink cartridge replacements by using specific Hewlett Packard printers that are on the market today.

Hewlett Packard has this thing called Instant Ink. Basically what it is in a nutshell, it's an ink subscription service.

I get it. It's another subscription service is another monthly charge

But if you hold on for just a second, it's actually really, really affordable and you definitely save more than 50%. So here's how it works.

HP doesn't care how much ink you use, they care more about how many pages you're printing.

A typical replacement ink cartridge for my model office, jet 6970 will yield about 350 pages in color. That's about seven 75 bucks for 350 pages of color and that's at the high yield cartridge.

Let's say I was going to print a bout 50 pages per month. That was my monthly print volume.

I would be replacing out a set of cartridges about every six months, so every six months I'd be spending $75 or in the course of a year, I'm spending about $150 in in cartridges to get about 700 pages printed through the whole year.

Okay, so here's where the real magic of instant ink comes into play. HP will put you on a 50 page per month printing plan for $3 per month.

The way that works is they'll send you a full high yield ink cartridge for $3 per month. They don't send you a new cartridge every month. They just give you one high yield cartridge and you can print 50 pages per month out of that plan.

Once your printer is starting to get low on ink, it automatically sends a signal to HP and they automatically send you back another high yield full ink cartridge.

Now this doesn't mean that you can't print more than 50 pages, it's just that's what your allowance in that particular plan. So for example, on the $3 month plan where you can print out 50 pages, if you print more than 50 pages, it's an additional dollar for an additional 10 pages.

Or if you do more prints per month, you could do something like a 100 pages for $5 per month or 300 pages for $10 per month.

So it really just depends on what your page yield is going to look like month.

But for myself, I do relatively low printing. I mostly do digital marketing and web design in my line of work. So there's not a whole lot of printing involved, but there is some printing and I'm well within the 50 page per month range.

So let's go back to the original page volume. So if I needed to print 350 pages every six months, instead of spending $75 for a new set of cartridges in six months, I'm only paying $3 times six months, which is $18 but if I'm only paying $18 instead of $75 let's get and figure out what that savings is like.

Okay? So I'm opening my calculator here and if I take 75 and a takeaway 18.

That leaves me the $57 savings, or to put it in a percentage, that 76%.

I may end up using less ink depending on the quality that I want to print out, but it doesn't matter because it's based on the pages that I print out.

So this gives you great flexibility to print out flyers and to print out reports at a very high quality without worrying about how much ink you're actually consuming. Because it's really based on the pages that you're actually printing up each month.

And again, if I had printed more than 50 pages in a month, it'll just be an additional dollar. And I can have another 10 whole pages.

So that's pretty much it. Just a really, really quick tip.

There's about 15 or so printers that HP carries that's compatible with their instant ink program.

What I'll get and do is I'll leave links down in the description for all of the printers that are available with their instant ink. Some of them actually include free ink, but what I mean by that is some of the printers are eligible for their free ink program.

They'll give you 15 pages per month to print out, and then if you print out a 16th page, they'll charge you $1 for that particular month to get 10 more pages.

But ultimately, if you only print, let's say like 10 pages per month, you'll basically never pay for ink. You do is you pay for that particular printer that works with that instant ink program that has the free ink option or the free plan option, and you'll never pay for ink unless you go over 15 pages for that month.

So that's an awesome option if you have a very, very low printing yield.

If you don't print a whole lot but you're irritated because right now you're about to go drop 80 bucks on a new set of ink cartridges, consider instead upgrading your printer to an instant ink compatible printer that is also available with their free ink option.

I hope you found that tip useful. If you did, please go ahead and hit that like button.

And again, if you're new here, please go ahead and subscribe and hit the bell button as I put out a new marketing tip every week.

Normally I do marketing tips. This one just came across because I bought a new printer and I thought the program is really, really cool.

I wanted to share it with everyone and maybe I'll do more of these if you drop a note in the comments, if you want to have more business general business tips in how to make your business more efficient.

Otherwise, I'll see you later.