Before you Print, Improve your Business Cards

admin — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 02:01:50 +0000

Strategies and Ideas on How to Improve your Standard, Traditional Calling Cards

Professional business cards are needed for your business since these prints are one of the important tools that can get yourself known in the industry. As you go for business card printing, especially online, you can find templates that fit your line of business; and to be unique with your identity, tweaking the elements of the design and structure can help a lot in transforming the layout into your own.

If you observe a template, very basic structures are given such as the name, telephone number, the photo, and the background. As you edit online, you are given the liberty to play around with these items to fit your own profession’s personality. With a few concepts on how to build custom-made and personalized business cards, just a little knowledge and tips are needed.

1. Background: The background of your template usually consists of a simple linear layout that covers about ¼ of your business card. First thing you can do is to change the color into what your main logo or company consists of. If the background design is a curvy swipe, you can straighten the lines and have the strip fill up half of your card with a fade out effect. Blend in contrasting colors along the shaded area; you can use jagged lines for a serious line of work, or a blend of swirls for creative services.

2. Enlarge name: Make yourself the star of the business card; aside from your business, you are promoting yourself to represent the work. With fonts, simple and bold is still ideal, but there are some instances when more sophisticated or groovy letter shapes are needed. For example, for a jeweler, script can better represent femininity and luxury; for a preschool teacher, fat and rounded fonts seem friendlier and child-like. The positioning of your name is not really important, what should be taken note of is making the size bigger, with the right font color to blend with your background.

3. Take design risks, play with colors: With online design tools, you have clip art choices for graphics. Take the risk in playing around with the shapes, connect them together, and come up with different patterns that can make up a design. Also, with the colors, blending can be easy if you start with just two contrasting colors to work on. As you go along, you can add two or more that you think suits your whole design, look, and business of course.

4. Use the back: Take advantage of using the full color printing on both sides feature. Planning a draft layout first on a piece of paper can help you come up with a nice and logical concept for your back design. Always think to leave space for a photo and a short tagline. Also, a fully-colored background at the back is better if you have a plain front, or vice versa.

Styling your business card requires taking risks, imagination, and basic knowledge on how to highlight and weigh what elements are to be focused on. With a cool, catchy, and personalized design, your potential clients will remember you and your business just the way you planned.

By: Kristine

Credit Cards for Small Business

admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:43:41 +0000

When you decide to start a small business, you find out pretty quickly that it takes more than skills and dedication in your respective area of work. Besides being good at what you want to do, you also need to known your accounting and financing issues, no matter how annoying and boring these may be. And the credit card problem for small businesses needs careful handling, just like that of a regular, personal credit card.

Choosing the right type of credit card is vital for the success of a small business. Even if you don’t have access to a corporate credit card, a small business card can be a major tool on the path to success. When you apply for a small business credit card, lenders will analyze your request from a variety of points of views. While their evaluation of the risk may vary according to various local factors, they will all take into account the “five Cs”: capital, capacity to make the payments, collateral, conditions and character.

Capital, meaning your personal investment in the business, outlines not only the size of the business, but also how much risk you are willing to take. Balance risks carefully – too much means you will be rated reckless, too little, and the lenders may think you are not serious about this. The capacity to repay the loan is, of course, critical for the lender and will be carefully analyzed. The collateral or the guarantees will show that you have a backup plan for returning the loan, in case things go wrong. The conditions represent the general situation in your geographical area and your respective line of business – mostly things that you cannot control (but you can make them look better in carefully planned business plan). Last but not least, character is the impression you make on the lenders – how trustworthy and business-oriented you appear to them.

If you take all these into account, your application is more likely to be successful right from the start. Of course, you also need to consider, carefully, which type of business card suits your needs.

Many small businesses rely on cash flow to pay for suppliers or contractors, because they need to purchase materials and services before their own clients pay up. You need to calculate the difference between the date when you purchase the materials and the date when the clients pay you back. If this is shorter than 30 days, go for a card that doesn’t charge you interest for the respective period. If it is two, three months or longer, go for a low interest card.

Also, you should think of how often you will have to travel for business-related purposes, and how a special type of credit card can help you with this, or how you will handle unprepared emergency situations that hustle small businesses constantly.

Some of the offers for credit cards for small business include Blue for Business Card – no annual fee, 0% intro APR for the first 9 months, credit line of up to $50,000 or Blue Cash for Business Credit Card – up to 5% cash rebate, no annual fee, 0% APR for up to 15 months. Advanta Platinum with Rewards, featuring cash back bonus, offers 0% intro APR for balance transfers, up to 50,000 credit line and various types of rewards for the things you buy most often (gas, office supplies and so on), bonus miles or cash back.

The CitiBusiness card has 0% APR for purchases for the first 6 months, no annual fee, a generous credit line and additional cards for the employees, with a credit limit set by you. The Platinum Business Credit Card from American Express has no annual fee and 0% APR for the first nine months on purchases and balance transfers.

Other options include Business Green Rewards Cash – no fees for the first year and no pre-set spending limit, and the Business Cash Rebate from OPEN: the Small Business Network, with up to 5% cash rebate, no annual fee, 0% APR for the first six months, no limit for cash back and no minimum spending requirements.

By: Jeremy Zongker

Personal Business Cards » Line Of Business

Before you Print, Improve your Business Cards

Credit Cards for Small Business