Businesspeople routinely hand out business cards to prospective customers, colleagues, and social acquaintances, both as a marketing technique and for an easy way to keep in touch.

Possibly because of the popularity of business cards, personal calling cards, which in decades past have gone out of fashion, are also making a comeback. Rather than scribble your name and phone number or email address on a scrap of paper, why not hand new acquaintances your personal calling card?

First, you need to decide on a style for your calling card. Designs range from the simply elegant to the boldly colorful; your choice should match your personality and your lifestyle. Second, you need to decide what information to include on your calling card. Traditionally cards include your name, address, and phone number; recently people have added their email address and sometimes their blog or other website address.

A caution: Be careful both in what information you include on your calling card and in the people you choose to share your card with. You don't necessarily want to share your street address with people you don't know, as you don't want certain people showing up at your doorstep unannounced or, in a worst-case situation, stalking you. You also need to be careful of identity theft: The more personal information you share with people, the more you open yourself up to someone misusing that information.

You may actually want to have a couple differentand hand out your information on an as-needed basis. For casual acquaintances who want to contact you, a card with your name and either phone number or email address is sufficient; for people you need to do business with or who need your full information for a legitimate purpose, you can include your street address and/or post office box as well as your phone number and email address. Another option is to simply have your name embossed on an attractive card and then write whatever information you want to share on the back of the card.

If you create a well-designed calling card and use a few simple precautions, you will find that the simple act of handing out your cards will help you make a memorable impression on new acquaintances and make it more likely that you will hear from them soon, which is your goal.

If you use print advertising as part of your marketing mix and your ads are cluttered they generally will not pull like clean and crisp advertising does with simple messages. As a young man I sold advertising for a very popular Aviation Magazine Called the Pacific Flyer and the Editor and Publisher Wayman Dunlop use to always tell me to keep my clients from cluttering their advertising.

Eventually I realized if I allowed my customers to clutter their ads too much they would not pull the proper results and there would be fewer repeat customers. He was right then and that same principle is very true today.

Do not clutter you ads. You see, today even more so, because people are busy and only scan the advertising, you only have a second to catch their eye and make them look and if it is too cluttered their eye moves on that the advertising dollar is lost.

So, often small business owners who advertise want to put as much as they can in their yellow page ads and in their newspaper or print advertising and often against better judgment from their advertising representative mostly due to ego the ad stays cluttered and is not effective.

If you pick up any trade journal in any industry you will see the same thing. Every month I read over 70 Trade Journals or rather page thru them and read parts. Due to habit I also look at all the ads and only rarely do you see the perfect, simple ad, which conveys the message and grabs the reader. You should consider all of this in 2006.

So often small business owners will design their own advertising and some do an exemplary job, but then some don’t and it is a shame really. As a former advertising representative for an Aviation Trade Journal in my younger years, well let’s just say I am pretty aware of the costs of all sorts of advertising, whether it be print, radio, TV, billboards, bus stop benches or even the Bus itself with one of those new shrink rap signs; boy those are cool and they better be as the cost alone is about $18,000 just to put it on the bus.

It is great to see your ad the top of page 3 of the local newspaper, as you know that will certainly generate some interest. But are you delivering the right message to all your thousands of potential customers out there?

Is that message consistent with other advertising? If you are not delivering the right message and it is not consistent you might be actually diluting your brand name, turning off your preferred future customers and cutting into the Return on Investment for that advertising. Don’t waste money.