Tag Archives: Business Card Templates

Tamerica Instant Card Desktop Business Card Slitter Review

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Overview:

The Tamerica Instant Card business card slitter is designed to help you quickly and easily cut your own short runs of business cards that you print in house.

This will allow you to create business cards for your employees or for yourself in just minutes without the need to involve a professional printing company.

Creating your own business cards not only allows you to save money but it also helps to ensure that business cards are available for employees immediately and helps to reduce waste by preventing you from having to order more business cards than you actually need.

Strengths / Features:

The Tamerica Instant Card business card slitter is designed to cut business cards that are printed 10 up on a sheet of paper. This means that a single printed sheet of business cards can yield ten business cards. With this system you can use standard business card templates in Microsoft Word (it even shows you how in the instructions) and can start creating your own business cards in no time at all.

The Tamerica Instant Card is the most inexpensive business card slitter that I have seen on the market. It is designed for home and small office use and really makes the possibility of creating your own business cards a reality. It is small, and really doesn’t require a lot of expertise to operate. All you need to do is turn it on, feed your sheets into the slot to cut them the long way and then feed the cut strips into the machine to finish the cutting process.

The Tamerica Instant Card business card slitter says that it is rated to cut papers that are between 150 gsm and 300 gsm which means that it can handle heavy index stocks and cover stocks up to 110lb. I tested it with 110lb index and it did fine. However, there is a warning on the top of the machine that states that you should not cut more than 50 sheets of heavy card stock paper at a time without leaving the machine and the motor to rest.

The InstantCard is rated to cut up to 6 sheets of business cards per minute. This means that you could potentially cut up to 60 business cards per minute. These numbers are probably somewhat exaggerated for the average user, however it should still be able to tackle moderate sized jobs fairly quickly. That being said, this is not a commercial grade machine and should not be used for high volume applications. It will not hold up.

Weaknesses / Limitations:

The Tamerica Instantcard business card slitter does not have any adjustments on it to allow you to change the slitters to adjust for your printer or for any variations that might occur during printing. This means that you will need to try and adjust the settings in your software if the cards are not placed exactly in the correct positions on your printed sheets. This can be somewhat tedious but isn’t a huge deal.

The Instantcard says that it can handle glossy paper, photo paper, magnetic paper, plain paper and coated paper. Most of the stocks that I used with the instantcard seemed to work fine. However, laminated sheets did not run very well through this machine. Additionally, you will need to be careful about using really heavy stocks. The motor in this machine can be damaged and ruined if you use stocks that are too heavy or if you attempt to cut too many sheets in a row without giving the cutter a break.

This is a small plastic business card slitter and it is probably fine for cutting a few hundred cards a week in an office setting. However, trying to use this type of machine in a commercial printing environment would be foolish. It is simply not constructed to handle high volumes of cutting and will not last.

Recommendation:

For small offices and home offices that are looking for a way to cut their own business cards on the spot, this is a great solution. Its price point and features make it a wonderful option for the creation of short run business cards and even magnets.

For commercial printers and large volume users this machine will be a huge disappointment. It is meant as a personal business card slitter and is really best when used as one.

Still, the Instantcard business card slitter is by far the cheapest business card slitter available on the market, is easy to use and is definitely a tool that you might want to consider for your office.

Digital Versus Old-School Business Cards

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In essence, marketing materials represent your business. It serves as your face in your target market telling the world who you are and what you offer. This is why it is important that your materials tell your story—that which you want your target customers to know and not what they should not know. It’s wise to start with the basic marketing materials such as the business cards.

When attending business events and functions, it is expected that you will exchange cards with your fellow attendees. At most, business card templates should have the following:

Your name The name of your business Street and mailing address Telephone number Email address Website, if you have any

The original business cards are first printed in black and white. But these days, businesses are looking for unique ways to present their contact details. A new trend gaining popularity today is the digital business cards. This type of card still retains the main purpose of the business card but takes to a different level. Businesses who want to keep up with modernization use the power of networking sites such as LinkedIn. They also use the applications such as Google Googles, Bump, and SnapDat to exchange digital business cards. These are more popular among the younger mobile professionals who want the feel of a high profile contact card.

Today, the iPhone is the most popular way of sharing and exchanging digital business cards. So, if you are using a simpler mobile phone that doesn’t have same capacity as the iPhone you cannot trade digital cards. It becomes more difficult to exchange digital cards when you are not using the same device or application as the other person.

But is digital business card the best way to reach out to your customers today? For sure, this can be a bit difficult to use to customers who still prefer the paper based business cards—those who have gotten used to collecting the 3.5 × 2 inch card. Similarly, customers who are not familiar and a fan of the internet will be hard to reach with this approach. These people may meet the digital cards with sour faces. It’s likely that it will hurt your marketing efforts, but the advocates of digital cards say it will only affect the number of people you get in touch with but not the quality of clients or customers you attract.

It may seem that digital business cards are the new way to reach customers today, but still the traditional cards are hard to let go. There would still be businesses and customers who prefer to exchange contact details through the old-fashioned way. Some people argue that because many do not really do anything with business cards, it’s only practical that digital cards replace the paper based cards. Others say that old-timers have to simply move on and embrace the digital innovation. There are also some who claim that going digital will help save the earth on less trees cut to make paper.

However, no matter how innovative we are today old habits are simply hard to break. So, depending on your target audience, digital business cards can for your business. But until people have no longer use for the old-school business cards, they are still the way to go for most businesses and professionals.