Essential Tool: Business Cards

You probably know the value of a good business card. Once you meet someone, it’s their card that sticks around as a reminder of who they are and what they have to offer. You want that reminder to be a positive, professional one when it’s your business card that’s doing the talking.

If you look through the shoebox or desk drawer of cards you’ve likely collected, you’ll see that it’s often most obvious what makes a good card when you see examples of bad cards. Use those bad cards to help inform what you want on your card.

You don’t have to turn your business card into a brochure or a substitute for your website—you want the card to be someone’s simple treasure map to finding your website or being able to quickly and easily find a way to contact you.

Stick to the basics so that your information is clear and easily read.

At a minimum, include these elements:

If your business name doesn’t give someone a clear sense of what you do, you could include a tagline or brief description of services and/or a title.

If you’re active on social media, you could include usernames and/or URLs for your social media presence.

Since professional printing is so affordable these days, don’t go the home-based printing route for this. (No matter how fine the perforations, people can usually still tell you printed them yourself.) Make a good first impression—and leave behind a quality reminder for repeat impressions—instead.

Even if you do most of your business virtually, it never hurts to have business cards to distribute in various situations.