Business cards

[Account Closed]

I'm going to a real estate investors meetup in about 2 1/2 weeks from now and I need some ideas on creating a good business card as a way to get my name out there. Aside from the basics such as name, company, address, phone number and e-mail, what other pieces of information should I put on this? Is it beneficial to have a website created before then? Any advice will help.

[Jason Fraser]

Consider your business card one of your marketing tools. I order mine from vistaprint. I'm always getting emails for discounts from them. Gotprints.com is another company that has reasonably priced cards. 

I have two sets: one I give to investors and other ones are for sellers. The ones for investors are the "free" ones vistaprint offers. You still have to pay shipping. They also have the vistaprint watermark on the back. That one is basically name and contact info. There's also my website. (I'll share an inexpensive way to set up a quick webpage to capture info towards the end). The free ones also limit the customization you can do. This is fine since all an investor really cares about is name, number, and email address to get ahold of you. You can go fancier later if your just starting out).

The sellers one has the basic info:name, number, email, and website. It also  has a blurb about how to get your house sold fast. It's just four short sentences. I bought the premium cards that allows for more customizations and doesn't have the vistaprint watermark on the back. These ones I'll pin on bulletin boards or anywhere with other business cards on display I.e. Car repair places, mom and pop stores. I went to check out this nightclub on an off night last Tuesday. As I was leaving I noticed they a place where you can leave business cards(it was mostly taxi service business cards and a couple of other businesses). I went back to my car and grabbed a stack to leave at the club...you never know who will take a card.

One more tip related to business  cards, you can create a flyer/business card holder by taking a piece of paper, folding the bottom (about the width the of a business card) and then staple the ends. Use a thicker stock of paper than regular printing paper.  Anywhere with a bulletin board, stick your flyer/business card holder. The main body of the flyer will have your tag line: we buy houses or whatever it is and contact info. The bottom half will hold a few of your business cards. In stead of pinning one card on the bulletin board (and having someone take the one card) you can now leave 10 cards. If the flyer business  card holder is still up and empty, you just add more cards. While it's empty people still have a way to get a hold of you. If you want to get fancy, you can add a QR code (the square with what looks like a Roarshak image that you can scan with a smartphone for more info).

So inexpensive way to have a webpage that can be done quickly. Godaddy has a product called instapage. It's free when you buy a domain name which $12.99. When someone goes to the domain name it goes to a webpage you can customize instead of site "under construction". It's only one page so Its a webpage vs a website which is multiple pages. You can add a form(which is used to collect info: name, number, email, and a text box to add more info. You can link it to Facebook and Twitter via their logos. You can upload a photo. 

I use this just as a landing page to capture investor contact info and what they're looking for. The information is then emailed to me and I transfer it to my CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) for better management. I'll upgrade it to full website later on. Later on I can integrate a form that sends all the info right to my CRM. For the time being it serves it's main purpose ...capturing info.

For  sellers I have a full website also through go daddy. I built it myself through their website building program.  This one I wanted it to look more professional than using instapage.