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You finally did it, and started your own business. It’s exciting, scary and expensive, so if you are like most new small business owners, then you probably have a budget and are trying to keep costs to a minimum. One of the most important things to do is to market your new business and get the word out there that you have new products and services to offer. In keeping costs down, Microsoft Word is fantastic in helping you develop your own marketing materials. In this lesson, I will you show how to create your own business cards in Microsoft Word. But to be honest, the easiest most time efficient way I have found is to just order through vistaprint , You get 250 cards for just shipping and handling and they look tremendously professional, I think you have to add $1 to have a clear backside , but that’s about it, total is about $8 and it’s on your doorstep in a few days. You can click here for that. The bad news is it’s only valid for Canada and the US. Sorry to you guys in India, I know a lot of you visit here.

For this lesson, we’ll pretend that your new business is about financial consulting. First, you will need to have Microsoft Word 2003 or above, access to the internet to download the template, the special paper to print business cards, and finally have an extra toner for your printer. You can buy the special paper at an office supply store like Office Depot– For example, you can get the Avery Packet for about $15.99 at Office Depot, which brings 200 cards of 2” X 3 1/2” size.

We’ll use the following fictitious business contact information:
Mary Smith
Money Hope
Certified Financial Planner
P.O. Box 90088
Miami, FL 36754
Tel 788-908-5567
Fax 788-908-5568
mary@moneyhope.com

Let’s get started!

1. Go to Start>Programs>Internet Explorer (or your particular internet browser) to access the internet. Enter the Microsoft internet address, www.microsoft.com and hit enter or the search button. The main web page should look like the image below.

2. Click on “Downloads & Trials” located to the upper right hand corner of the web page.

3. Now click on the “Office Templates” option and a new web page will open.

4. Here you will see the office online template web page. Enter “business cards templates” in the search box (located to the upper left hand corner right under the menu options) and click the search button or hit Enter.

5. Go down and click on option four called “General Business Cards” to select it. Please note you need to check the template’s program version and make sure you have that program version installed in your computer or you will not be able to download the template; for example, the template we are using in this lesson requires version Word 97 or later and we are using Word 2003, so we should not have any problems downloading this template.

6. Now click on the “Download Now” button to download the template. Next, Microsoft Word will open automatically with the template as a new document.

7. In this step, you see that the template opens up in Microsoft Word. Before customizing the template, go to File>Save As and save the template as new document so that you don’t loose any work.

8. Now enter the business contact information into the template as seen below. You can enter the information for all the card entries or just enter it once and copy and paste in the other entries. You will be able to print ten business cards from one sheet of paper.

9. Finally, go to File>Print Preview to preview the sheet, then place the special business card paper in your printer and print one test page to make sure the information prints successfully. After testing it, then feel free to insert a couple of sheets of paper and print several pages at once. With just five printed sheets of paper, you will have 50 business cards ready, and then just carefully tear each card individually – the paper comes pre-perforated to allow for easy tearing.

You did it! See how easy and fast was to create your own business cards? Now, It’s good to create your own business cards, but over the years I have found that sometimes the time,effort and money aren’t worth, with companies like this one here willing to do business cards for the cost of shipping and handling, you have to really weigh your options. And if you have other more sophisticated programs like Microsoft Publisher or Microsoft Outlook you can find other fantastic templates for business cards if you want to create new ones or change old ones. Good luck handing out your new cards!

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