Although you might be an internet entrepreneur who lives much of his/her life online, it doesn’t mean that you won’t ever interact with people in the ‘real world’ (and I encourage you to get out there and speak to ‘real people’). When you do, it’s important that you have a good quality business card to hand over.
Business cards are relatively inexpensive and you won’t need thousands of them – in fact, I have about 7-8 boxes of old business cards from previous jobs in a storage box at home that I never got round to giving out…I’m sure you do too. It seems that a minimum print run is never below 500!
It’s important that your card is well designed, is in keeping with the online nature of your business (ie. not staid and boring, as many business cards are), and mirrors the graphical elements that make up your website. Remember that branding needs to be uniform throughout your collateral – business cards, website, email signatures, advertisements, flyers, etc.
What ever you do – don’t opt for a templated business card – get one custom designed (try elance for inexpensive designers). Templated business cards look tacky and unprofessional.
The card should contain all of the necessary contact details and your website URL. If it’s appropriate to your business, consider including your Instant Messaging ID (eg. Skype, ICQ or MSN Messenger), as well as the standard telephone, fax, email and postal details. You might even consider adding your IDs for other networking sites, such as LinkedIn or Twitter, if you do business via these channels.
For printing, I recommend using a local printer. There are services online that provide printed business cards – like Vistaprint – but it’s not possible to gauge the quality of the print job beforehand – again, business cards printed on poor quality card look unprofessional. If you deal with a local printer you can request proofs of the work before having the entire print run done. That said, Vistaprint and others are good for small print runs of promotional material (eg Christmas cards).
When receiving business cards from others, always make notes about the individual on the back of the card, so that you don’t forget who they are – particularly if you are attending a networking event and you are meeting lots of different people. If appropriate, send a follow up email several days after meeting the person. This can often be a great source of business leads. Store all contact details in Microsoft Outlook or an online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, and try to link to the person on LinkedIn.
I use a combination of LinkedIn, Outlook and Interspire’s Email Marketer, instead of maintaining a physical card file of every business card I’ve ever collected.
Tags: business cards, crm, email marketer, linkedin, outlook, twitter, vistaprint