Business cards can bring loads of repeat traffic and referrals to your website.
If you've ever tried to run a client-based business, you've probably
already noticed that the conditions for success under a client model
are nearly the same as the conditions for success with Internet
business. A website can't succeed without referring links from other
popular websites; a lawyer can't succeed without referrals from
satisfied clients or other business contacts. Referrals, in both
business models, are the single determining factor to success.
For an offline client-based business, business cards are the simplest
possible way to increase your chances of getting referrals. For online
business, this holds less true, simply because a business card isn't a
hyperlink: your prospective client still has to physically type in your
website address. But a good business card is still the simplest
possible way to increase your website traffic by working in the real
world.
And increasing your website traffic, in this sense, doesn't just mean
increasing it for prospective customers. The properties of a website
that make it useful for selling products to customers (the ability to
sell eyeballs, atoms, and bits) aren't the be-all-end-all of Internet
business. A website, in its simplest terms, is just a collection of
various files--page files, certainly, but also images, music, and
print-ready documents. In other words, a website allows you to show
business contacts exactly what your business is about, with much more
complexity than even the largest print advertisement. If you're a
writer, you might archive some of your best sample work. If you're a
lawyer, you might include detailed information about a few of your best
cases, including testimonials from satisfied clients. There are any
number of possibilities, limited only by your bandwidth and your
imagination.
It's this aspect of Internet business that uses the targeting abilities
of business cards to their fullest advantage. In traditional business,
a business card gives you a potential contact in a strategically useful
place, nothing more--although that's quite a lot. But with Internet
business, your business card not only gives you that contact, but
allows him or her--at his or her convenience--to research thoroughly
exactly what you can provide, what you've done in the past, and on a
fundamental level, just what your business is about. And if your
business is in order--as any successful business will be--that's a sure
gateway to gaining new clients.
Business cards also eliminate one of the major drawbacks of the
Internet: the fact that as vast as your potential audience is, it's
limited to those people who are on the Internet enough (and savvy
enough with search engines and "portal" sites) to find your website and
your services. One of the keys to Internet success is advertising, yes,
but that advertising is too often confined to the Internet itself,
which is, for all its size, a limited pool. If you hand out business
cards with your website address on them, however, you can attract
people who might have spent an hour on the Internet, ever, but who'll
certainly spend more time on the Internet now--at your site. It's a way
of increasing the size of your potential audience, and thus of
increasing your business--all at a reasonable cost.
So we can see that business cards and Internet business, despite the
drawbacks of each, can combine effectively to push your business to the
next level. On its own, a business card communicates the fact that your
business exists and gives prospective clients a convenient way to
contact you when they need you, or simply if they're curious. And on
its own, the Internet is a surprisingly small community--but when
augmented with business cards, you can make any pond large enough to
swim in, however big a fish you intend to become.
I'm sure that by now you see the power in having a business card for your online business.
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