This is a guest post by Tom Harris, Your Marketing Coach. Tom helps entrepreneurs and small businesses develop and execute marketing plans. He specializes in website usability and effectiveness.

What’s in a card?

Of all the myriad marketing materials that we create to promote our businesses, one that certainly deserves more of our attention and thought is our business cards.

Business cards don’t just provide contact information – they leave emotional impressions.  Your card is YOU.  And you will be kept or tossed in the wastebasket, depending on what your card looks like, feels like, and the impression that it makes on the person you hand it to.  If you don’t want to get tossed in the wastebasket, here are a few things to do:

Photo: have a professional headshot taken and put it on your business cards.  No arguments, no excuses, just do it.

Use Color: if you dumped a basketful of business cards on a table and spread them out, you’d see a lot of WHITE.  With black ink.  Not very interesting.  Color is much more interesting.  You do want to appear interesting, don’t you?  Use some color.

Not a brochure: your card needs to tell in VERY simple terms what you do, but it’s not a brochure.  Don’t include detailed descriptions of your services.

Don’t waste good real estate: there are two sides to a card; use both of them.  Maybe contact info on one side, photo on the other.  Lots of possibilities.

You are more important than your business: especially if you are a one-person show, make your name much more prominent than your business name.  No one cares about your business name, but you do want them to care about (and remember) you.

No Title: don’t include titles like President, VP of Marketing, CEO, Owner etc.  But you should include a tagline that describes what you do, such as Life Coach, Business Consultant, Interior Designer, etc.

Create an impression: your cards need to memorable, different, unique, yet simple and clean (you’ll probably have to hire a professional graphic designer to accomplish this).

Hire a professional graphic designer: Oh, yes, already mentioned that.  No arguments, no excuses, just do it.  Your business cards are NOT a good place for you to cheap out.