NFC is the new digital business card

If we’ve met in the last few years and wanted to connect, I probably shared with you my digital business card. While I still have the old fashioned paper/cardstock business cards, I find that most of the time, people want to add me to Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. rather than call or email me.

There are a number of easy ways to go digital with this which puts you in control of the content, what you want to share, etc. It’s also much less expensive than printed physical cards (unless work is paying for it of course). Most modern smartphones can read NFC cards but if someone isn’t rocking a newer phone, you may have to look for another solution for them – You could simply put a QR code with the same destination on the NFC card itself to cover all your bases.

These NFC blanks are (usually) re-writable so you can change things up anytime.

Here’s a video I made a while ago covering how all this works:

Here’s the steps:

1. Get yourself some NFC blanks. These are very cheap on Amazon or Aliexpress (even cheaper, but slower shipping) and come in a number of different formats from traditional business card shaped cards, stickers for your phone, key fobs and others. Just search for “NFC Blanks“. I have both these cards and a fob (similar to this) on my keychain (pictured above). The cards have a bigger antenna and seem to work faster than the fob – at least the one I have but both work just fine
2. Download NFC Tools (iOS or Android) – it’s a free app that will let you program the above NFC blank
3. Decide on what you want to link to – You can have different cards for different destinations or you can use LinkTree or a similar service to warehouse all your links in one place. If you have a website, just create a page with your links like I did
4. Using NFC Tools, you’ll input the URL for the destination in the previous step and then ‘WRITE’ to the NFC blank

As you can see in the above screenshots, the NFC Tools app is pretty easy to use and you have a lot of options for creating (aka ‘writing’) to your own NFC cards. There are presets for URLs, wifi passwords and bitcoin wallets to name just a few. People often get the sticker version and you can program them to open a Spotify playlist, trigger smart home routines and tons more. You can also program Amiibos for a Nintendo Switch as well.

If you pay for the pro version, you can save your files and are given a few more options. One thing is that it will create a QR code of your URL which you could also print as a sticker to put on the NFC blank for those that either don’t have or haven’t enabled NFC on their phones.

Happy tapping!