You may want to have a website that serves the function of being your online business card. Most traditional business cards that people have today are very small pieces of card stock. But, a business card is really only a piece of paper that you hand out to other people. There is a physical limit to how much information anybody can fit on any business card.
Using a website as an online business card, however, changes everything! A website is not presented on paper. Most websites contain what we all call “pages” but they are not really pages like in paper products such as magazines or books or newspapers. A “page” on a website can easily contain far more information than any single business card could ever hope to include.
This is why having a website as an online business card is a terrific idea. If you never have considered this, well, now you know that there are people who already use the Web to present themselves online using the concept of an online business card. Having such an online business card helps to establish and reinforce your personal brand.
However, you need to keep in mind one very important factor: Any physical business card that is printed on card stock is no good unless someone hands it to another person. Printing a few hundred business cards and then not handing them out would be a waste of your time and money. In the exact same way, having a website as an online business card and then not calling attention to that online business card would also be a waste of your time and money.
If you decide to have your own website as an online business card, you must follow up by taking deliberate steps to call attention to that website. If you do not take such actions that can call attention to that website you are using as an online business card, you will have wasted all or most of the time and money you invested in getting a website in the first place.
Setting up a website as an online business card but not following up by promoting the existence of that website to other people is the equivalent of having physical printed business cards created for you and never handing them out to anybody. This usually means that you must pay somebody to promote your website.
You may have thought that if you spent time and money to get a website that you would not have to spend any more time or money beyond that initial investment. Sorry, but real life in the business world of the Internet does not work that way at all.
Either you have to pay for advertising in one or more of the mainstream media channels (radio, television, newspapers, magazines, etc.), or you will have to pay for marketing your website using the Internet. Either way, you will have to pay money to somebody, or, you will have to spend your own time (which is worth money).
The honest truth is that there is no way to avoid this additional expenditure of money for promoting the existence of your website above and beyond the initial investment to get your website in the first place.
This is why I recommend getting a website that ATTRACTS VISITORS as part of why it exists. You can certainly use a website to serve as your online business card, but as I have shown here today, you are only doing one portion of the work of setting up a website unless your website is built to promote itself to your target audiences actively and on a full-time basis.
Remember: No matter how pretty a website can be made to look, unless that website is actively promoting itself on a full-time basis, that website is all looks and very little else.