With my 'round the world trip fastly approaching, there is one item missing from my travel arsenal. An item so important that would hopefully increase networking, blog traffic, and friendship connections with very little time and effort involved. Most people may not think about them when running a travel blog, as they are often reserved for careerists and the business elite, but the items are a perfect and cheap way to get the word out to fellow travelers about your blog. What is it exactly that I'm speaking of? Business Cards!
Designing a business card for your blog or website can range from the ultra-simplistic to a skill level attained by years of schooling to become a graphic designer. For the artistically challenged rest of us, the simplest way of creating a business card for your blog is very simple and only uses Microsoft PowerPoint. The following is a brief step-by-step guide to create your own travel related business cards at home in under an hour of work! (Guide Developed Using Office 2007)
Step 1: Create Template
A standard business card in the USA and Canada is 2 inches tall by 3.5 inches wide for a 1.75 aspect ratio. The basic form can be created by inserting a rectangle shape. PowerPoint often defaults with a filled in color scheme, in which the transparency needs to be set to 100% by right clicking and selecting 'Format Shape' and slide the Transparency bar to 100%. Shape can be fine tuned by right clicking and selecting 'Size and Position' and setting height and width to the dimensions outlined above.
Step 2: Add Blog Information
Blog information can be added using the insert 'Text Box' feature and orienting the text to your desired position. Font, size, color, and other properties can be changed to your liking to highlight desired features. I like to keep each specific zone separated with unique text boxes for quick modifications on the fly. A lot of text in one box is a bit difficult to mess with on formatting issues if changes are desired.
Important information that may need to be included in these text boxes include
-Name
-Title
-Blog Website Title
-Blog Address
-Social Networking Names
-Other Related Information
Step 3: Add Logo or Travel Pictures
It is likely that you'll have some space left over if all information is justified to one corner of the business card. The rest of the available space can be used to for a logo or other image. If you want the entire card to be an image, the graphic will need to be placed in the background with text over and appropriately colored text to contrast the image. I've added a few pictures to my business cards from the various travels that I have been on. Placement can be fine tuned by right clicking the image and selecting 'Size and Position' and opening the 'Position' tab. This tab illustrates the horizontal and vertical (away from left and top respectively) in the entire PowerPoint window pane. If the image is sized appropriately, it is likely that only fractions of an inch are necessary to move it into the proper placement. The image can also be cropped or resized with greater control in these tabs. I've also added social networking images for Twitter and Facebook to be more professional appearing that were pulled from a random Google search.
Step 4: Group Images and Place Into Word Document
In order to copy all items in one go, left click a clear part of the PowerPoint pane and drag over, highlighting all elements of your business card. Once all elements are highlighted, right click and hover over 'Group.' A second tab will appear and the word 'Group' can be selected. This will lock all images into a single image, for the ability to copy and paste into a word document. For future edits, this method can be undone in the same way by ungrouping the items. A word document can be opened and multiple business cards pasted by selecting 'Paste Special' and 'Enhanced Meta-File.' A basic paste will alter the graphic appearance, and not look as appealing. In addition, margins should be set to 0.1 inches to be able to have at least 8 business cards per page to optimize printing capabilities.
Step 5: Print and Enjoy Final Product
Normal business cards are printed on thick card stock rather than the traditional flimsy paper. The printing of the final products are available at most printing stores such as FedEx Kinko's for a little bit of money on your part. But considering printing 200 custom business cards on a website are hundreds of dollars, the investment is quite worth it to get 8 per page and cut at your own convenience. Once printed, your business cards are ready to go for the hungry masses and you can be proud of the work that was put into it!
4 comments:
I highly recommend Moo mini-cards. I got the idea from Forks and Jets and they have been fantastic to use. People love the mini size and you can print on both sides. If you find a discount code online they are pretty cheap.
I've never heard of Moo mini-cards. They look pretty sweet. Seems to be about $20 for a set of 100. Not bad for being custom! Do you have an online copy of them? I'd like to see how it turned out.
You can definitely print a lot of cards affordably by doing it this way, but I so dislike Microsoft Office and the bix-box chains!
I printed my cards at Moo.com (pretty popular among a decent amount of travelers). Probably not the cheapest, but worth the investment. Though mine serve a double purpose—trying to inform people of my blog, but also future contacts for my fledgling freelance design work.
One thing I've learned is I'm hesitant to give out my cards to many other travelers. It just depends. I usually just connect with them on Facebook and then tell them they can get to my blog through that.
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