Personal Business Cards and Why You Should Get Some!

A personal business card is one of the items that I always carry with me. While a work business card is a great thing to have when visiting customers, suppliers, or potential business partners, a personal business card is something that I use during local networking events, random conversations at coffee shops, or volunteer fairs.  I keep them in either a cute pink business card case or inside my wallet.

I ordered my cards on Zazzle, which is a great website with a ton of cool modern designs and relatively frequent promotions. When I purchased my cards, they had a 50% business cards sale so check in frequently on the site of your choice to minimize cost for the maximum number of cards. I paid around $11 for 100 cards including shipping. 

I chose one of the preset designs and configured it to meet my needs. The front of the card states my name and my tagline. Words make for a cleaner tagline than phrases or sentences about your abilities. Keeping the number of words in your tagline low allows it to be more impactful.  I chose the following:

• Engineer - I am an advocate for women + minorities in STEM and proud of my engineering degree. 
• Volunteer - I volunteer for various social causes and would love to get involved in more.
• Learner - I love to learn and connect with people who are willing to teach me something new.

Using these three words as my tagline has been a nice conversation starter/closer with new contacts at events as we discuss how you can boil your life down into as few words as possible. 

My personal card has three things on the back:

• my website to demonstrate some of my work outside of my profession
• my email which is a link to me in a more formal way
• my cell phone number which is a link to me in an informal way

While some experts say that you should add a picture, I felt that linking my website allows someone to see my face again if they find that necessary.  Social media handles can be included if that is more applicable to your work but in general, my volunteer work contacts need a phone number to call for help and an email to send confirmation details after the conversation. Whatever choices you add to your design, make sure you spellcheck before saving the final design and paying for the cards!

Other creative ways to use personal business cards that I have heard or read about are:

• Address cards after people have moved to share info quick with friends or family 
• Cards with your children's ages and relevant allergy information for play dates 
• Photography business cards with examples of your work on one side