Do You Know Where Your Email Address is Today?

Having people go to your website is not always easy: remind them with a special business card.

Whether you understand it nor not, the web is likely here to stay; those businesses that do not yet have a web presence, or at least email addresses, are likely to get left in the dust. All of your correspondence and especially your business card should contain some reference to your website. If you have gained their interest, people want to know more about what you do. What better way to tell them about you than through your. We will discuss what to do about websites in a subsequent chapter. Your business card is the key that can open the door to many business relationships and your email address gives people an easy way to contact you. The argument with publishing an email address is that you will get junk email as a result. I want to emphasize that you may well get some junk email, but for the most part you will get good correspondence.

I attended and had a display at a Chamber Symposium this past year and had a bowl for drawing a giveaway. Our prize was a 2 day sales process training seminar. We told people that they should not put their card in for the draw unless they were truly interested in the training. No problem there. When it came time for the draw, the person winning was really excited about it and made sure that he had all the information he needed in order to attend. I went home that evening and went online to do the registration for the winner and found that he did not have an email address printed on his card. I had to enter my email in order to complete the registration. As a result, he did not get any of the email confirmations that are automatically sent. His reasoning was he would get too much junk mail if he placed his email on a card.

By the way, he ended up sending his partner to the seminar who in turn had no problem giving out his email address. The one thing to remember is: you need to specify the ground rules for sending you email.

Bette Daoust, Ph.D. has been networking with others since leaving high school years ago. Realizing that no one really cared about what she did in life unless she had someone to tell and excite. She decided to find the best ways to get people's attention, be creative in how she presented herself and products, getting people to know who she was, and being visible all the time. Her friends and colleagues have often dubbed her the "Networking Queen". Blueprint for Networking Success: 150 ways to promote yourself is the first in this series. Blueprint for Branding Yourself: Another 150 ways to promote yourself is planned for release in 2005. For more information visit http://www.BlueprintBooks.com