Doing Business in China

Personal business cards How Many Business Cards Do You Need?

If your employer goes to the effort of printing you business cards, the expectation seems to be that you’ll hand out those cards at each and every event you attend. But your job may not be the only thing you have going these days. The number of people pursuing something on the side is constantly growing. Heck, even full-time freelancers seem to wind up with multiple approaches and multiple cards — a blogger who also does SEO optimization may have a card for each aspect of his business.

But what does that mean for the rest of us? Just because the cool kids have multiple business cards doesn’t mean that all of us have to try to remember which card to hand out at which events, right? I think the answer really comes down to ‘it depends. And it depends mores on you than on your employer. Whether or not you have an employer who prints your cards for you, it's still important to have at least one card. But that doesn’t mean you need to hand everyone you meet both your personal and your employer's cards.