What is a business card?

What is a business card

I believe a business card is a small piece of cardboard, or paper that you give out to a person so they remember who you are and what you do. In an ideal situation you would like to think they will keep that card forever and pass it on to their grandchildren, a result almost in possible to accomplish, but if you could accomplish that, even though you will be out of business, wouldn't you have an incredible business card!

I am not going to tell you how to accomplish the above merely how you can have your possible client keep your card for five or six years, and at the end of that time there will still know who you are and what you do.

Of course the card you MUST have your photograph on the front!

I have been talking of this for 20 to 30 years, perhaps longer, and the majority of photographers dismissed this with a wave of the hand with the comment that they do not want their photographs on a card, yet they are expecting to make a good income from photography and they are too embarrassed to put photograph of themselves on display to the public, and they expect the public to beat a path to their door, to have photographs taken, so that they the public, should display the photographs in their home's.

With thinking like that is it any wonder that professional photography, on a whole, is a depressed industry with many of its participants living on less income than they had planned.

Okay, we have established that your photograph should be on the front of the card, is that all there is to it?

No! Anyone can do that, and very many are doing that. The real clincher that will make your card different and kept is what you have on the back of the card.

For many years now I've been placing on the back, one of my photographs that I have taken on my travels, but not everyone is able to travel like the writer, but everyone is able to do incredible photographs of your local area and beyond and it is a series of these photographs that you place on the back of your cards.

So you have the same photo on the front of each card, and on the back you incorporate a series of say, 40 different scenic photos, of course it you do not start off with 40 photos, but with whatever you have.

You print these yourself as you need them, commercially printed through a commercial print does not give you the flexibility or the quality you need on these cards.

You do not need an expensive printer for this project, I use a simple $100+ the Hewlett-Packard all in one, printer, scanner, copier and print this on double sided inkjet plain paper composing the document in Microsoft publisher and after a few tests you can get the alignment as close as you need it for this job.

Once they are printed I put them through a laminator, and again a cheap A4 laminator from the Stationary Warehouse, this implants a glossy finish on the photos and makes the paper that they are printed on substantially enough to be handed out as a business card.

Then of course they need to be trimmed and I use a rotary trimmer which makes the job easy. I have 40 different photos on the back of my cards so I stack my cards up into groups of 40 and in that way have no duplicates with me at any time.

When I meet somebody that I wish to give a card to I put four or five photographs on the table and asked them to choose a photo of their choice, sometimes people choose two, now I have no argument with that, and they go away with a photographs of their choice, and a photograph of me, which when they turn it over and see me, I tell them it is "Comrade Ivan in Red Square".

Occasionally I meet somebody I haven't seen for five or six years and I go to give them a card and they tell me, "Oh! I still have your other card" so something must be working.

Click here to see a layout of the front and the back of my business card.

If anybody wants to see what these look like in real life send me an addressed envelope, with a stamp in the necessary place, write on the flap of the envelope, your business card, and I'll send it back to you by return mail.