There are plenty of ways to make sure that your business card networking will be effective but you only need to remember these few but cardinal rules to broaden your set of contacts.

3 simple rules to networking business cards success

1.    Be ready to give

Never leave home or the office without your business cards.  It would be best if you leave a set at home, one in the office and one in your car.  Keep in mind that you need to replenish your set if your supply is running low.  

When you order your business cards, make sure that you make wholesale purchases.  Not only do you save on the cost of bulk order, you will also get a sense of security that you have the year covered and that you would not run out of business cards, at least not in the very near future.

2.    Seize the moment

The reason why you always need to have an ample supply of business cards wherever you go is because you will never know when an occasion to hand out business cards to important people may rise.  

The person sitting next to you in the mall might be your next biggest supporter and client.  Or a friend of your friend may be sponsoring a trade show that you have been wanting to take part in.  

What you think is a simple day in the office or just one of your usual Saturday nights may be your saving grace in the future.

3.    Make it worth looking at

You spend so much time making yourself look good and presentable to your clients.  You should also do the same with your business cards.  They have to look good and worth keeping since this card will represent you whenever you are not around.  

Online printing of business cards offers plenty of ways to help you achieve just this.  Starting with the design, you can get hold of professional looking business cards designed by professional graphic designs at low or even zero cost.  You can also get custom jobs which include size, shape, ink and finishings.  You can get a regular sized card or those with bigger dimensions.  You can also request for business cards with rounded corners, or irregular shapes.  As for finishings, you can get scored or folded business cards.  You can have thermographic letters or those that have been embossed.

Making your business cards appealing does not only make it worthy of being kept in another person’s wallet but it also increases the name recall significantly.

Networking business cards is not an easy task.  You need to have an eye for opportunities, as well as identify people who you think could help you, and whom you can help through your business.  However, you know that it’s all worth the work, especially once you start reaping the benefits of being well-connected.

You can make up to $50 per month per site, hosting your client sites. This is much easier than you could imagine. You don’t need to get a dedicated server and you don’t need to worry about trying to compete with web hosting companies. Most people think about just getting a web site up, and the first people they think of is web designers. Terms with “web designer”get more searches per day than terms with “hosting”. People are looking for web designers to get their sites on the Internet.

Web designers and developers can incorporate the sale of hosting into their web development and design projects. As a web designer you can bill your customers for the hosting fees within the design and then host the account for a year or on a month to month basis. You will be surprised at how much extra income you can generate from your web design customers.

Providing hosting for your web design clients will give you greater assurance that your customers will come back to you to make changes or update their site. This allows you to keep generating income from your work and customer base. Let’s look at some numbers, and how billing for hosting on top of your web design work can make you some serious money. Let’s assume you get paid $500 – $1000+ for a site design. If you charge your client for hosting as well you could generate up to $50 extra per site, per month in hosting fees. You could make up to $1100 to $1600 per site, per year instead of just $500 or $1000 per site. With 100 clients this could equate to $110,000 or $160,000 per year instead of $50,000 – $100,000 per year. On top of this, remember your client is more likely to come back to you to update and maintain your site which means more money for you, for easy work.

With a little effort and focus you could generate a very healthy income in your web design business. With tools like Joomla, WordPress and other highly customizable content management systems you can make the hard work incredibly efficient so you can focus solely on the design. There are a huge amount of free, powerful web applications, content management systems and shopping carts you can quickly install in your reseller web hosting account and produce a design style for very quickly. There are also a myriad of ready to run, specialist applications written in ASP, ASP.Net and PHP that you can bolt on to your customers site, customize the design for and really impress your them. With these easily installable web applications you can very quickly impress your customers and raise the value of your web design fees – and the fact that they are specialist customized web applications you have put together, your web design customer will be happy to pay your hosting fees.

For your design business you don’t need anything fancy, you don’t need dedicated servers or specialists billing or server management systems. You can utilize the cost efficiencies of shared hosting to maximize your profit. One way to do it and a lot of designers do this, is get a new shared hosting account for each site they design and charge the customer more than they pay.

The better way to do it and really maximize your profit is to get a reseller hosting account where you can host all your customer sites in the one hosting account. This works out much cheaper than getting a separate account for each customer site. A good reseller account will give you far more room to move and even greater cost effectiveness which means even more profit and less effort.

Getting up and running with a good reseller hosting account is easy and incredibly affordable. For just a few hundred dollars per year you can host 50 or more sites. A quick search on reseller hosting will give you plenty to choose from. In our experience Windows hosting reseller packages are a good idea as a Windows reseller hosting account will give you the freedom and choice to run ASP, ASP.Net as well as PHP sites with MySQL or SQL Server databases. Linux hosting offers the cheapest hosting solution available but does not support ASP or ASP.Net.Net applications. For an extra few dollars a month you can get Windows hosting and dramatically increase your options for your web design customers from a wider array of available web applications and freely available code in ASP and ASP.Net.

With Windows hosting you can use all your favorite web design tools and you’ll have the vast resources of Microsoft development products like Visual Studio at your disposal. As a reseller looking at Windows hosting accounts make sure the host offers Multiple IIS sites and not just unlimited domains. To properly host multiple sites on Windows each site needs to have it’s own entry in IIS (Internet Information Server – the Windows web server). Many hosts say unlimited domains and what they really mean is running unlimited domains on one site. All you get with unlimited domains on one site, is your multiple domains show the same site or requires you to write code to detect the domain and redirect to a directory. This is not a great way to run your customer sites.

With each site having it’s own entry IIS means you can have separate application settings, assign it to different application pools and maintain separate log files. This means you can have more control, more flexibility and produce a much better solution for your client. Being able to put your customer sites in separate application pools means that if one of your customer sites get’s busy or some crazy bug causes a problem it will isolate it to just that site and you wont end up with all your customers screaming at you that their sites are down.

After 12 years working on the internet. Through booms, through busts, good times and bad times web designers and developers quietly rule the web. Businesses needing a web site look for web designers first and in our experience they really don’t want to know too much about hosting. As a designer you can save your clients from the complexity and confusion of hosting and make money from it. To make money from hosting your client work you really don’t need to leap out and set yourself up as a web hosting provider with billing systems, hosting plans and support systems and processes. Start off by hosting all your sites in one reseller hosting package and you’ll be surprised at just how much extra money you can make for very little effort. The best thing of all you can keep your focus on why you became a web designer – designing web sites!

Graphic designs are both decorative element and necessity for website designing. Graphic Designs can make creative graphics that suits your web design project. Hundreds of companies have accepted that graphic designing is an excellent feature to enhance the visibility and creditability of their website. They can also be deployed for framing eye-catching online promotional tools. In graphic designing apart from creating images their placement in right manner is also important.

Apart from delivering online information in catchy manner, it has to be appealing to eyes as well. The information that is being used is mainly for advertising or publicizing the products, services or the company itself.

Limitation of graphics is dependant on the imagination of the web designer that implies it has no restraints. Where to use it, how to use it and what type of designs to use are decided by the graphic designer along with their clients.

Where to look for it

The graphic design companies have professional knowledge about the works of graphic designing. An excellent graphic service provider employs designers who are trained and hold required educational training in this field. Graphics is a very vast field requiring understanding of various technical and designing aspects.

If the professional graphic designers want to stay ahead of competition, they have to keep themselves updated with latest offerings and technology in graphic designing. It is done through graphic design magazines, books, online tutorials and so on. Whenever any new technology is invented, it gets published online in the form of news or graphic design stories.

Internet is being trusted as the most updated media that publishes fresh stories and news in comparison to other media. If you want several very good graphic design references, then again turn to World Wide Web for it. Online courses are also available to polish the graphic designing skills. Also various discussion forums are present online, where you can look for valuable tips, suggestions, and solve your queries.

Uses

Graphic designing apart from being used in business websites, is useful for education purposes too. Hundreds of children around the globe are referring online tutorial websites to enhance their knowledge and learn new things. The illustration with animation, text, moving picture and static images, create interest and better understanding. Effective presentations and business cards can also be made using graphics with text. Their application is carried out in various forms of media like newspaper, magazines, internet, TV, films, advertising hoardings, etc.

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