 So in this video, I wanted to talk to you about business cards. Should you get one? Should you not get one? Those are the only two questions, and I'm going to answer them right now. Should you get business cards? It depends. Let me play it out for you. What I think you should do when you're first starting out is you should start with going and meeting people. Meet people face to face first. Go to meetups. Go to co-working spaces. Go to whatever is going on where you can meet either other translators or people who might need a translator. I mean also do your stuff online. Obviously I've been through this before. You should do a lot of stuff online to try to find people who need you. But obviously business cards, you're not going to use them online. You're going to use them when you're face to face with people. So now I'm only going to address the face to face stuff you should be doing. And which once again is going to meetups, going to co-working spaces, stuff like that. Trying to get in front of people who might need your translation services. At that point, you tell them you're a translator. I do Spanish to English translations. If they show any interest and they say, oh, you know, I might need a Spanish to English translator. Then at that point, don't get a business card. They've already showed interest. So why do you need to get a business card now? They already know you. They showed interest. So see how it goes. You know, and a couple people after you talk to them, you might get someone who actually wants to hire you. And at the point that they hire you, then that is when you still don't buy a business card because you already got hired and you already have a job. So why should you have a business card? Basically, I'm saying, I don't think you should get business cards until your profits can pay for them. I don't think this should be an expense where you go into debt or, you know, you go into the red before even getting started. You shouldn't go into the red at any point for business cards. Let's put it that way. You can use your profits to buy them if you still want them. But quite frankly, I don't think, I don't think there's much use for them at all. I didn't have business cards for a long time. In fact, it's only recently that I ever got business cards and pretty much all my translation career went by without my getting business cards. Having said that, I do recognize that there are some uses for business cards and there can be some very good points for having business cards. Let me go through that quickly. So getting a business card is okay. The main point I want to drive here is that it's not an excuse to delay starting out. I do not want anyone out there to think, Well, I could start off as a freelance translator. I could start off, but I need to wait until I design my business card. I get it good. I order it. I make sure it looks nice. Oh, I want to change something. I order it again, blah, blah, blah. No, you do not delay anything because you don't have business cards. You go out and meet people. You talk to people. You get started right away. You're not delaying anything to have business cards. That is probably the main important thing from what I've seen and I feel like a lot of people use that as an excuse to use many things and business card is one of the things they use as an excuse not to start out. So don't delay starting out because you need to get business cards. That's a stupid reason to delay starting. So just get started. And the second thing I would say is don't spend money on a business card. I mean, you have to spend money, but spend profits on a business card. Once again, you don't want to go into red for a business card. So only spend what you've already made in a profit. If you still want to get a business card, then you can get it. Third thing that I would say is don't just get business cards because you think it's cool to have a business card. If you get one, you should have a goal in mind. And you need to figure out what that goal is. What is it? Do you want to be remembered? If you want to be remembered, then you need to think, okay, do I want to make this unique then? Do I want to do something that they'll remember? Should I get a business card from one of those places like mood.com or something that does kind of crazy and different business cards? Well, yeah, you might be remembered, but maybe for the wrong reasons because you want to be professional. So maybe you should get something a bit more serious and try to envision why you want to get a business card. And not just like, oh, it seems important to have business cards. So I'll have business cards. That's what you're supposed to do. No, you don't have to have a business card, especially if you're working on your own. I think you'll find that if you talk to other freelancers, other freelance translators, freelancers in general, entrepreneurs in general, many times they don't have business cards. Like if they have set up a company or something like that, then they'll have a business card, but many times they won't. If you feel inadequate about it at any meetup or whatever that you go to, you can always say, well, I didn't bring mine with me. There's always people who say I didn't bring mine. Many times people don't like bringing theirs because they don't want random people sending them random emails. And so they'll say I didn't bring mine, but I'll take yours if you want or something like that. You can pull that off and keep doing that. And in fact, I wish I'd done that many times. So that's just my two cents. I really think they're kind of overvalued, overestimated and people just assume you always need to get a business card. And especially I really cringe when people say I can't start out until I have a business card because that's not true at all. And even worse, many times people are like, I can't start out until I have a business card. I can't have a business card until I have a good logo to put on it until I designed it until all that. And in the end, you're going to waste more than a month before you get started just to have that stupid business card which won't do anything for you anyway. So those are my two cents about it. It can be an added extra, but it's definitely not an important aspect of your business. And I think you should keep that in mind. If you disagree, feel free to let me know. Feel free to let me know in the comments. If you disagree or maybe you think business cards are some of the most important things you can have in business. I mean, let me know. Let me know why and be curious to see. Because I feel, look, I have business cards now. I definitely use them. I hand them out to anyone I can. I think in terms of sales, they're not bad. They're cheap. You can get a bunch of them really cheap. And you know, you're working the numbers there. And if you hand out a hundred, one or two of them will remember you. And that's good. But when you're first starting out, honestly, I don't think they give you much bang for the buck. And so I think it's better to start off without. Anyway, I hope you found that interesting. If you did, please don't forget to click like because that always helps. And don't forget to subscribe and you'll get more videos about freelancing and freelance translation. Otherwise, I'll talk to you next time. Thanks. Bye. Hello. Articulate. I'm recording a video. You're on video. Yeah, it says hello back.