Business Cards

Are traditional business cards a viable means of advertising and promotion for a professional escort?

The answer to this question is varied depending on if your clients are married, how you intend on giving them out, what's printed on them and where you plan on leaving them or giving them out.

Who's your client base?

If your client base is mainly married men, you will have to think very carefully on whether it's worth the expense of making some and what's to be on them if you decide to carry them. Wives go through their partner's wallets all the time. If she finds a card with your details on it ... EEECCK! For this reason, you are going to want to have a very discreet card and may even want to go to the extreme of printing one with a guys name on it with a blokey service she would never call like a sporting clubs name. This way your client would know what the card was for, but his partner wouldn't if she found it and wouldn't be as likely to call the number on it to check up on him.

If your client base is young unmarried guys or your running a sexual surrogacy service, then a more explicit card may be ok. With these cards you could put your name, work phone number and actual website address on them. Of course with these gents you could have a card as explicit as you like and sometimes an over the top sexually explicit card may be held onto for longer than a boring looking business card.

Depending on what your selling you may be able to get away with handing out cards. Some wives allow men to be caught with a strippers card or lingerie waitress's card in their wallets because they explain it away by saying they were organising a stripper for a work function, birthday party, bucks party or poker night.

How are you going to give them out?

You have to put some serious thought into this because it can get you into some serious legal dramas. It is illegal to solicit in a licensed premesis or within view of a school, place of worship or an area zoned as residential. This means you will get in trouble if you leave your cards in a hotel room (no phone book stuffing allowed), pub, bar, phone box etc. This means making business card holders in the shape of a coaster is out of the question to leave in casino's, pubs or bars, although if lingerie waitressing in a private residents, you could leave them for guys to pick up if they were comfortable too and they would be a cool gimmick I suppose.

If we accept that it would be a good idea to be able to give to a client or potential client some type of "reminder" what might be possible.

The thing which differentiates business cards is level of explicity and information on them. Sooo let's go thru them one at a time:

Straight Forward Business Cards

These are the type of cards every business person walks around with. They have your name, location (city only, no street address), contact telephone number, email address and website address (depending on the level of discretion you need).

Depending on your personal preference you might or might not be explicit about the nature of the service provided. Once again this would depend on the level of discretion you're aiming to achieve, but also will depend on your marketing strategy. For a sex worker marketing as a professional discreet escort, you would aim for a card that looked like an everyday card, for someone who's marketing strategy is a little more sexually explicit, you may want to have a more full on card that lists services and uses more sexually explicit language and images on it.

Examples of straight forward business cards can be found here: http://www.phrizbie-design.com/business_card_design.html

The above discussion presupposes that you will clearly identify yourself on your card, even if you are not stating explicity the nature of the service provided.

Disguised or Discreet Business Cards

With this option the whole issue of you and the service being provided is disguised so that the card holder could retain the card in his wallet or pocket without concern. With these cards you need to disguise your name, website address, phone number and service you provide. So let's break down each of these issues one at a time:

Disguising your name - you cannot put your work name on your card in case someone see's it, decides to check on the name so Googles the name. If someone was to Google my name ""Lucy Blake", 100 pages would pop up in Google with all of my sex work reviews, my two escort websites etc. This would spell DOOM for anyone caught with it. This means I either need to leave off my name or make it something that wouldn't betray me in a search engine.

For example: instead of calling myself "Lucy Blake", I call myself "Henry Blake"

Disguising your phone number - as with my name, if someone was to Google my work phone number, it would come up with 100 pages of reviews and my website. In order to get around this I either need to leave it off or there is another alternative.

To disguise your real number first decide on a local telephone number that ends with the first four digits of your mobile. Then when you give the card to someone you, or better still the recipient, writes the last six numbers of your mobile on the back of the card.

You then explain to him that to call you on your mobile he simply dials the last four numbers on the front of the card followed by the six handwritten numbers on the back.

Alternatively you could put the first 4 digits of your mobile number on the card, make the rest of them fake and then write an address on it using the other numbers of your mobile number eg.

Henry Blake

303/801 George St

Sydney NSW 200

0414 333 666

Explain to the guy how it works and he'll think it's a cool sneaky game to play. Most people love little conspiracies and this could be one of them.

Disguising your website address - it would defeat the purpose of the exercise if you were to put your usual web address on the card ... www.lucy-blake.com would be pretty obvious. So,  instead, you register a domain name www.sydneybusinesssupplies.com and put  that on the card. Then what you do is have your ISP "point" that domain name to your actual web address so that when it is entered up pops Lucy's site.  Be sure to register a seperate email address while you're registering the web address eg. Blake_h@sydneybusinesssupplies.com

In Summary for a Discreet Business Card

To design a discreet business card I would set it out in the following way:

Sydney Business Supplies

Henry Blake

303/801 George St

Sydney NSW 2000

0414 333 666

www.sydneybusinesssuplies.com

blake_h@sydneybusinesssupplies.com

Alternate Business Cards

Coffee Club Cards - If you're giving out cards as a coffee club card or frequent flyer/fucker card, this should be considered as well and will impact on the design of the card, how you give them out and you'd also have to think of keeping a seperate log for when a client turns up and says "I had a card but I forgot to bring it, but I'm up to my 5th visit and you promised me a free bonk on my 5th visit".

When you design a coffee club card, you're going to want to leave space on the card to mark off number of visits, make a registration number for them so you can log them in a seperate log book and be very explicit when giving them out as to the rules of using them ie. if you don't bring your card with you, it wont count towards a visit etc.

High Impact Marketing with a card

Your business card can be a hard hitting marketing tool. These cards are designed to make people remember you way after you have left. Take a look at this site for examples: http://creativebits.org/cool_business_card_designs