In January, I ordered 500 Too Shy to Stop business cards designed by Roby from Always Creative. The cards list my name, my position, and my e-mail address. Since I received them more than six months ago, I think I only used about 5o cards.
(Pictured at left: A lot of business cards)
Maybe some people are better at utilizing business cards. However, I always forget I have them, even when they are handy in my purse!
I don’t have money to purchase fancy marketing and promotional materials so I try my best to use what I have in new ways. When money is tight, the economically challenged get creative.
I decided that my business cards could serve a better purpose as a general advertisement for Too Shy to Stop rather than a way to give strangers my e-mail address. How could I transform them? I would have to be resourceful.
(Pictured at right: A lot of shipping labels)
I found shipping labels, an X-acto paper cutter, and my printer from college (plenty of red ink!).
The labels I had were too big (2″x4″), but I decided that I could cut them in half horizontally for a perfect fit. Using Microsoft Word’s label wizard, I entered the exact brand and size of my labels and added the URLs for our Twitter page, our Facebook fan page, and our Facebook profile page.
(Pictured at left: Yes, we have a paper cutter in the house)
The text looked like this:
Follow: http://www.twitter.com/tooshytostop
Fan: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Too-Shy-to-Stop/126344132192
Friend: http://www.facebook.com/tooshytostop
I repeated these three links twice on every label, then printed a full sheet of them. When the sheet was finished printing, I used the paper cutter to cut horizontally across each label so that I was left with one-inch-thick strips of label.
I peeled off each piece of label and affixed it to a business card, covering my name and e-mail address but not covering “Too Shy to Stop: an online arts & culture magazine for young Americans”. Because the cards are not four inches wide, I had to use scissors to cut off part of label that was hanging off the card. No biggie!
(Pictured at right: Ta-da!)
Transforming my business cards was a rather tedious and time-consuming process, but I will definitely get more use out of these things now. I can bring my new business cards to events and to the city. They are great conversation starters!
Otherwise, they would just collect dust.