Seth Godin on business card mistakes:
- Don’t print your own cards. Just because Avery and others make those little perforated sheets of paper doesn’t mean you should use them.
- Don’t use big type for the address and contact info. The #1 way we can tell if a business card is cheesy is with a glance at the type size. Really.
- Don’t buy those color business cards with your face on them. You’re not an ordinary real estate agent, so there’s no sense in acting like one.
- Don’t go with metal business cards. It might work for Steve Wozniak, but everyone else wants to bring your cards on an airplane.
- You might think it’s a great idea to do a full color card with a big (lousy) picture on it. It’s not.
- I like rounded edges. But only if you leave plenty of margin. (as below)
- Margins matter. Anytime your type gets anywhere near the margin, you’ve blown it.
However: For real estate promotion, the business card form factor is a tiny little workhorse. Here’s a Black Pearl that’s not in that post: People fear commitment. Taking a flyer from your flyer box can seem to them to be too much like risking being “sold” by you, you Loki-like trickster. We buy flyer boxes that have a little pocket at the top for business cards. If someone won’t take the flyer, they just might take the much smaller, less threatening business-card-sized flyer we make for the home. After the “Sold” rider goes on, we swap out to our business cards or to a card promoting us as listers.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Jim Duncan says:
And I have to ask – where do you get the boxes with the “card pocket”?
August 21, 2007 — 12:41 pm
Greg Swann says:
> And I have to ask – where do you get the boxes with the “card pocket”?
Saunders Manufacturing. The Arizona sun is not kind to plastic, so we get one or at most two houses out of one of these boxes. Saunders sells higher-priced flyer boxes, but this is the best for our needs — flyers, one flat and prominent, with the little sinus at the top for business cards.
August 21, 2007 — 5:45 pm
David Phillips says:
Don’t forget to add:
-Don’t put so much info on your business card that you need to string a few together and make a book.
I saw a business card that looked like a charge card. Pretty snazzy but way off for our market. Though I did keep it as easy entry for those pesky locks…
August 21, 2007 — 8:25 pm