Mercury

Here is a link to the Wikipedia article from whence I ripped the following paragraph.

The Mercury dime is a ten-cent coin struck by the United States Mint from late 1916 to 1945. Designed by Adolph Weinman and also referred to as the Winged Liberty Head dime, it gained its common name because the obverse depiction of a young Liberty, identifiable by her winged Phrygian cap, was confused with the Roman god Mercury. Weinman is believed to have used Elsie Stevens, the wife of lawyer and poet Wallace Stevens, as a model. The coin's reverse depicts a fasces, symbolizing unity and strength, and an olive branch, signifying peace.

I spent the morning hot-gluing a handful of actual 90% silver content "Mercury Dimes" to the "info" sides of my incredibly gorgeous, brand new business cards and then I spent the day going all around City Hall finding bulletin boards that appeared to welcome postings and I tacked up samples of my six designs, some with a silver dime glued to the back, most without.

All anyone might notice about any of the business cards without physically taking them down is that they're beautiful.

Then, when their curiosity wins and they take down one of my cards they not only get a QR code to the best website on the planet, they will be taking an actual print. Even the business cards are limited edition! Once we run out of these six designs of business cards we shall not reprint the same cards again; we shall move on to other designs. Those "priced-out" of purchasing the 13"X19" format prints can still collect the cards, and that's kinda cooler because it comes with a story.

"Good hunting!" is a thing people say, right?

Quality isn't something that can be told. It can be felt or it isn't there.

When you hold our business card in your hand, you understand that even our card is valuable. In a world of disposables, it's a bit of a rare treat for our fingertips to experience a properly tactile sensation..

By far the most fun feature of my business cards, though, is that I affixed (hot-glued) a handful of genuine 90% silver "mercury" dimes onto the faces of a little stack of my new business cards. And then I distributed those business cards all over the place. More or less at every unguarded bulletin board around City Hall!

Of course I expect the cards with silver dimes to disappear quickly, and maybe even the rest. And then... I'll slowly put up more. I only distributed about 20% of my cards-with-a-silver-dime-attached, so I can keep trickling them out for a while. I think that will be fun for everyone.

I use 100% my own resources for all of this (as evidenced by the insanely high quality of everything to do with our brand) and it's important to me that I place cards around in a manner that makes people feel lucky when they see them, so I don't take a "spray and pray" approach.  I place them, deliberately.

The cards are simply beautiful and are made on an unapologetically thick paper-stock so that the act of handing over one of these cards feels very rarified in both the offering and in the receiving. 

I only ordered 1,000 of the cards for myself, and another thousand for the four others who "make up my staff." (Still sounds so weird to say that) made of six different designs. When I need to order more (through MOO, by the way; We did not skimp) I will select six new images for the design options and the original six designs will simply not be available anywhere. 

My business cards, themselves, will have actual resale value potential. Which is great because they cost about 46 cents apiece to print, and I'd prefer they not be discarded immediately.

 I did some exploring of other approaches to online brand promotion for comparison. After dabbling a bit I didn't like how much control Google insists on. For instance it was very finicky about capitalization and punctuation. No FUNNY BUSINESS, Mister! 

I had my first attempt to write some copy as required "auto-rejected" by a bot that said my site was misrepresenting itself, but the bot offered neither solace nor guidance. I tried again, but it was like driving with the Five-oh right behind you the whole way.

Not a problem, per se. But annoyingly restrictive for my tastes. I got an ad written that was approved and which IMMEDIATELY started getting hits on my website.

Analytics show they primarily came through Lord Google, (😘) Which is a good data point to have. 

But I think, I'm going to have a little bit more FUN than that with my brand promotion. I'll keep people WANTING my cards. I'll keep them looking out for them. 

Realistically, most people can't afford the full sized, limited edition prints that I offer, but the business cards contain beautiful prints and are accessible to anyone I connect with.

I'm not especially interested in pushing a million prints out the door. I'm not running a sweat-shop.

The vast majority of people should enjoy looking at my photos and bookmark my page and check in every once in a while. And collect my business cards if they can get ahold of them, with or without a silver dime glued to it.

All I want is to offer everyone the chance to see through my eyes and to understand that to me there is beauty EVERYWHERE. 

Anyway, I could go on and on (as some of you can attest, first hand) but suffice it to say I had so much fun today getting to act like the silver dime fairy!