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 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
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
