Throwing around business cards?

Various business card companies offer free business card incentives and such online. I was thinking about the possibility of taking advantage of such an offer for a few hundred business cards with basic information about my website, and then leaving said business cards haphazardly all over the place.

Maybe leave some in food courts, at businesses, give to random people, leave on horizontal surfaces? Anyone have any experience doing this? I feel that people chancing across a business card may feel slightly more tempted to visit a website than when coming across a random link online.

The downside I suppose is that the number of visits equals the number of business cards you spam around, if you're extremely lucky. This can prove to be expensive.

few things off the top of my head to factor in :
A) How likely is someone to pick a random business card?
B) How likely are they to actually look and read it
C) How likely are they to actually visit your website
D) How likely are they to either Buy something, Click an affiliate link or whatever

Not to say its a bad idea at all, there are places that will make you pro looking business cards for cheap. Might as well spend the $20 for 1,000 and see what happens.

Not a bad idea but it can get real expensive fast. You can also do ad flyers.

Do you provide any discounts on your packages ?

Yeah i think it would work but also cost you a good amount of money

Perhaps if the cards had a very compelling design with little information so the person is tempted to visit. This results in poor conversion. Adding more service info or toning down the design reduces the chance of a visit but increases conversion. Your method is more suited to spreading a viral site.

For free cards, sure try it out. But for a custom design and high quality cards, my firm charges a decent amount, as do other firms or card companies. So once you exhaust your free offers, you have to come up with a better method to optimize exposure, conversion, and ROI.

All our reps do this. Every time they go some place like for meetings, out to eat. They have to leave a business card and a pen.

We do our own printing so that is pretty cheap. We order the nice pens.

We have tracked it down for about every 200 we spend doing this we make 1 to 2 orders. The order could be web design or SEO.

We have been doing this now for over a year plus a few other things that most people don't think about doing.

Try the business cards that look like folded $20 bills (they actually fold and have your message inside). Drop them anywhere. They're not cheap, but they all get picked up, because they look like the real thing.