How to Get Business Cards for 5 Bucks

Earlier this year I got an email from Yaro Starak saying that he’s going to be visiting Vancouver and since I’ve been a student of his Blog Mastermind program I really wanted to meet up with him in person.  He emailed me a few days later saying he was going to be attending that weekend’s Dot Com Pho event put together by John Chow.  It was an awesome opportunity to meet both Yaro and John Chow in one event.

The Dot Com Pho event was one of the largest Dot Com Pho’s John ever put together.  I think he had a record of over 30 people there and I was definitely glad I decided to go.  While there though I realized something… I had no business cards!

While everyone else was networking, they were handing out business cards with their personal details on them like their “preferred” email address which doesn’t get a lot of SPAM, their personal phone number etc.  I felt like a total tit for not having my own business cards.  I had to write my number down on little scraps of paper and hand it to people who were asking for.  Not cool.

The thing is though that I didn’t really have a lot of lead time to get business cards printed before the event as I only found out a few days earlier that I would need them.  That’s when I learned my lesson.  Make sure you always have business cards.

When the Blog World Expo event came up, I made sure that I had business cards printed so that I could hand them out at the event.  This time, when I met people like Darren Rowse, John Chow and Tyler Cruz in person I felt a lot more prepared when they pulled out their business cards and wanted to exchange cards.

I think sometimes we get so caught up in this digital world of Blogs and emails and cell phones that we often forget that some of the best networking you’ll do will still be face-to-face at some event somewhere and for that you’re going to need business cards.  Even if you don’t have a company incorporated yet, or you’re just thinking about starting a company, just get some business cards that have your name, email address and phone number on them.  They don’t necesssarily have to be business related business cards.  You could just put “Your Name” and “Blogger” or “Entrepreneur” underneath.

The trick is to get some ordered so you have them on standby for when you need them, since it can take a few weeks to get some done and you might not have that much lead time when the next networking event pops up.

How to Get Inexpensive Business Cards

Now, since a lot of us don’t have hundreds of dollars burning a hole in our pockets waiting to be spent on business cards which you may or may not use in the next few months, there are ways to get some fairly inexpensive business cards to have on hand just in case you need them.

If you live in the United States, one company that’s currently running a promotion, offering FREE business cards is called Vista Print.  Their Free promotion offer allows you to order 250 Free business cards based on one of the 42 different card designs they have.  Of course this isn’t as good as having your own personalized design made, but FREE is a good price for business cards.  What you could do is just order some free cards for now, and have them on hand in case networking opportunities come up, and then if you find yourself using business cards all the time then get some more personalized ones ordered.

The only fee you pay with the Vista Print offer is about $5 for shipping and handling.  Is there a catch?  Not really.  When you go through the order process on their website, it will ask you to add extra things to your order like letterhead, stamps, etc. which all do cost money, but you can easily just say no to all of them and claim your free business cards.  Their idea being that if you order your free cards from them, when it comes to ordering your custom designed cards, you’ll hopefully come back and do business with them.  That’s a pretty cool way of getting new customers.

How to Get Custom Designed Business Cards

If you want to spend the money to get some custom designed cards, there are plenty of places to go to in order to get some cards done.  I would recommend hiring one person to design your cards for you and then find a print shop to print them.  A lot of people go to print shops to get cards designed and that’s not the best place to get a custom design.  Print shops typically specialize in printing things, not designing custom designs.  For my cards, I just used the custom designed mascot I got for my Blog and designed the rest of the card myself, and then I took it into a printing shop to get the cards printed.

It cost me about $70 CAD for 250 cards, but you can find better deals depending on the card stock you use, whether it’s glossy or not and depending on how many colors you use in your design.

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