If you’re promoting any online business with out utilizing business cards then you are doing yourself a disservice of fairly significant proportions. It really is an easy comfortable way to communicate with your potential leads. It is also very cheap in comparison to other methods. It doesn’t take a great deal of effort to distribute you business cards. You can give them out to just about anyone you come across. Most people are agreeable to taking and reading a business card if it is just handed to them. Also, you can leave them in conspicuous places where peoples natural curiosity will cause them to pick one up and take it with them.
What are some of the resourceful ways you can get busy with business cards? Well one creative method though not to pleasant to talk about is to leave them in public rest rooms. I leave a few anytime I am in one. In my own business Infinity Downline I find activity to my sales funnel following such placements. You can also leave your business cards in book stores in magazines or books that have to do with the nature of your business. You can leave business cards in cafes and eateries under the salt shakers or such where patrons following you can find them. Or you can leave one with your tip to give to your server if you think your business has appeal to them.
Another good method I like are drive throughs. Think about all of the drive throughs you zip through. You have fast food restaurants, banking institutions ATMs to name a few usually busy situations where people drive through in their vehicles. What you can do is place a couple of your business cards where they can be discovered by the next few people behind you. I have never found yet a drive through where you can’t locate a slot, crack, nook or recess to secretly leave some business cards in.
These two preceding methods if you think about it requires no extra time in your schedule or activities than what you are already doing. All advertising is, whether it be online or offline is communication. If you do these easy methods methodically and every time, it can add up to hundreds if not thousands of eyeballs looking at your business per year from no more effort than what you are already doing. If you have your business websites URL on your card this can create another easy stream of traffic to your website.
Sometimes with business cards rather than putting information on them about my business I put a small appealing contextual ad on them instead. This is designed to get a person curious enough to check out my website later when they are at their computer. On these kind of business card ads I usually only list my business websites URL anyway so if they are curious they have to go online to my website to find out about what it is I am marketing.
I typically like to generate a sense of urgency with my text ad in who ever is looking at my cards. This is accomplished by stating there is a bonus listed on my website that is soon expiring. This lets them know they had better visit my site soon before it is too late and they lose the chance to get my bonus. Often people will visit just to satisfy their curiosity and find out what the bonus is all about if nothing else.
Another thing I do with my business that can be applied to any business is to promote it with colorful or black and white fliers, or circulars as they are sometimes called. These fliers can be placed in local businesses that have bulletin boards. You may need to get permission from the owner first though. If you have any doubt you should definitely ask them before tacking them up. If they do not want them their, they will just throw them a way, and that can be a waste of your time and money.
Often local business establishments have their bulletin boards located right in the entry way of the store and are usually open to the general public. You see all manner of ads from people from furniture sales to home based businesses. Walmart use to have public bulletin boards here in Oklahoma, but they ceased the practice and now entry store boards are only utilized by them and not open to use by the public.
Occasionally businesses have display boards that are only their for their local patrons business cards. Old fashioned Mom and Pop cafes are famous for this practice and these types of boards are usually smaller than the typical bulletin board and are plastered with local businesses business cards. They are usually placed near the cash register where people can look at them while they are waiting to pay their bill.
You can if you have enough aggressive boldness, personally hand out your fliers in community areas like busy city sidewalks. This is effective when large groups of people are using the sidewalks in their daily activities. To give you a good example of this, think of how many movies you have seen depicting hoards of people all transversing the avenue sidewalks of New York City. You could probably pass out a thousand in an hour with hardly any walking on your part just letting people pass you by and handing them one.
A great deal of your evening night clubs and popular bars have bulletin boards as well. These are usually good places to place your fliers. If you are one of the bars patrons and frequent it often, you can do some low key networking as well while you’re out having a good time. Word of mouth is still a very effective low cost offline method to communicate your business. In a social situation it can be done in a manner that generates curiosity and questions where you do not have to chase a person to tell them about your business. People are naturally curious about what other people do for a living so the nature of your business can easily come up in a conversation.
While on the topic of mixing it up socially. College students are notorious for getting out and about with their friends and meeting new people. A great number of college students have a social networks that transverse their personal sphere of influence many times over. Another thing in relation to college campuses is that there are many many bulletin boards to be found on them. In my area the University of Oklahoma is prevalent and they have bulletin boards not only inside in most buildings but outside on public walk ways too. An additional tip, you can add little tear off strips at the bottom of your fliers that each contain your contact info, whether that be a phone number, email address or the URL of your website.
By the way if you are going to use a phone number as your contact, you might consider using a voice mail that is toll free to your prospect. In this method you can have an outgoing promotional message of 2 or 3 minutes in duration that is really there just to garner interest in your business and to possibly elicit to your prospect into leaving their own contact details where you can call them back. This is a good way to pre-sell your business where you do not have to waste time doing it live over the phone.
If you choose to do a toll free voice mail make sure you include a call to action for your prospect to leave their name and phone number as often they won’t unless asked or told to. Then you want to call them back as soon as you can. In this way you might catch them before their enthusiasm has started to fade and it may be you find when you call them you have a new customer to your business. Or in my case a new member to my affiliate business.