Claudia the Panda

A group of bloggers whom I meet often at gatherings and events, most of us have our own personal namecards. Usually there will be our name (of course!), our email, our blog url and some customised stuff that is much like the real person themselves. Such as photos, illustrations, tags, designs and stuff. Some of us also have our contact numbers on the cards.

Some of the many namecards I’d collected from Bloggers

But why should we, bloggers, get a namecard? We’re just a bunch of people who likes to write on our blog and people around started calling us bloggers. Bloggers need namecard for what??

Personally I’d owned many versions and types of namecards over the past couple of years. Each served a different purpose. But when I started taking a more serious passion for my blog, I decided I needed one that I can give to my friends and people I may meet so they can find me online or for them to remember that they’d met me after our meeting.

Of course there’s always the search engines, blog aggregators and what not, but having a namecard that you can give or exchange with someone makes things more… hmm… what word should I use to describe it? More professional or more personal? Or perhaps, more real? Business people are always represented with their own company namecards isn’t it? I’m not saying that you’ve to be a professional or full-time blogger before you can have your own namecards. It’s just nice to have a card that you can give out when you meet someone new isn’t it?

Questions to ask before you get those cards printed
(1) Will I ever be making use of these cards?
(2) Who are the people whom will be getting these cards?
(3) What do I want to tell them about me and my blog through this card?
(4) Do I want to remain anonymous or do I want to start giving a face to the blog(s) I write on?

If you are able to answer the above questions pretty easily, than you should start thinking of a design and get those cards printed soon.

10 reasons why you should/ you want to have a personal (blogger) namecard
(1) You want to start revealing yourself and your blog.
(2) You want to create credibility to the things you blog about.
(3) You want to create an identity or a ‘branding’ for yourself.
(4) You want to represent yourself instead of your company during networking events or gatherings.
(5) You are starting to receive invitation to events/ functions where you’ll meet people but you do not have any namecards to exchange when you meet them.
(6) You want to start forming relationship with fellow bloggers, new friends, partners or potential sponsors or even future employer.
(7) You are spending too much time blogging, plurking, facebooking and whatever -ing online. It’s time you get out and start meeting people in real life!
(8) You are interested, learning, sharing and participating in social media or anything social online.
(9) You’ve attended couple of networking/ social events and by the end of the day, you’ve forgotten some of the people you’d met but didn’t get a card from. (This happened to me couple of times. I always try to exchange cards with someone new at an event so that I will remember them after the event. Guess I’m getting old and memory is failing me.)
(10) You just feel like having something that spells You to give away.

And finally, you’ll never know who you might bump into at the next gathering or social event. So always be sure to have some cards on you for an exchange!

Some other bloggers who blogged about their namecards too… nadnut, jayden, krisandro and rinaz.