In the first part of our series on marketing for digiscrappers, we talked about forums.

Marketing Your Digiscrapping Business: Forums

How Can I set up my own forum?

Blogs are another tool that many are using for marketing and simply expressing themselves. And in thinking about the topic I realized that there are a number of topics for us to cover. So these are topics that can look forward to!

• How to Choose blogging software & set it up
• How to help Google find your Blog
• RSS & Blog Readers
• How to find out if anyone is reading your blog or if others are talking about you on their blog
• Finding your voice

Before we talk about those topics I want you to think about what features make blogs effective? I have been driving Heidi crazy with my requests. Everytime I read about a feature or see one on someone else’s blog that I think is a good idea, I ask my sister to add it here. Have you noticed how our blog has evolved?

My wish list became so long that we decided to switch from a 2 column to a 3 column to accommodate it. This change in style about a month ago took Heidi hours to do. But we’re pleased with the results and in using some free web applications we’re able to see those statistics & know that it’s effective. So join me in a tour of our blog & it’s features & then at the end I’ll give you some examples of 2 column blogs. Then you can go home to your blog & tweak it (or ask your webmaster to do it).

In left column:

• photos of us (well they were there - is it better to have them there or no? that is the question?)
• about us information (a bit more information about who we are)
• contact us (so people can ask questions or send comments by email)
• links to other areas of the site (so important to connect people to the whole place)
• Search box to find information in previous blog posts
• Recent posts
• Archived posts

In right column: (and these are here because this is the most prominent location)

• Place to subscribe to receive blog by email
• Subscribe by RSS feed or blog reader
• Category tag cloud is clickable & allows user to search blog posts by topic (try it & click on one!) The largest words have the most entries.
• Blogroll of links to other blogs

After each blog entry:

• Link to Email the blog entry to someone else (this encourages spreading your blog information)
• Subscribe to the blog by email (another opportunity to in case they missed the top right corner)
• A number of Social Bookmarking Lists so the reader can easily add the blog entry to their list for future reference.
• Comment area

If you’d like to see an example of a great 2 column blog, check out Angie Pedersen’s Scrapbooking Industry News. To be honest, many items on my blog must-have list have come from her’s. She also has another blog that I read, Scrapbook Marketing.com That’s also a 2 column blog.

My suggestion is to look at blogs when you’re reading them & consider what features you like and which ones you think are helpful. Then go back home & implement them. Much of it can be done yourself & for free. Everything that we have here is free with the exception of the site that hosts it. Stay tuned & we’ll take you behind the scenes of this blog.

Do you have questions about blogs or blogging? Please ask & we’ll try to answer them

Here is the other font tip that I alluded too!

This will allow you to use your fonts inside your photo editor with even installing the font. All you have to do is view them in Photo Manager and then open your editor. Users that this has been successful for have been using: ACDSee Photo Editor, Adobe CS, and Corel PSP.

Here are the directions to use uninstalled fonts:

• Open Photo Manager and view your folder containing uninstalled fonts. (Note: This is viewing uninstalled fonts in a folder, NOT installed fonts.)
• Select all font ttf files & choose Database | Rebuild Thumbnails & Metadata. The creation of the thumbnails of the fonts appears to put the Fonts in your system’s memory & can be used by other software.
• Open your photo editor. (This works for ACDSee Photo Editor, Adobe CS, and Corel PSP)
• The editor now has available all the installed system fonts AND the uninstalled fonts that you viewed with Photo Manger. And you can USE the uninstalled fonts.

The one downfall that I have found in doing this: Let’s say you save the layout, reboot your computer (i.e. the next day), open the layout and do not open view your uninstalled fonts with Photo Manager, the fonts in your layout will all revert back to a default existing font. Get in a habit of always opening Photo Manager and do above steps before starting your editor. If you do open a layout and the font’s revert back to default existing fonts do this: Close the layout without saving and close your editor. Start Photo Manager and do above steps, then reopen layout and editor and your font will be there (assuming that font was one of them viewed.)

This tip came from one of users. I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it. If you have questions or it doesn’t work, please post in our forum: DigiScrapInfo forum

The advantage is that there are some fonts that are used infrequently or they’re very large & don’t show up nicely in the list of installed fonts. Also, you don’t have to have a long string of fonts installed to choose from. You can just preview them in ACDSee & choose the ones you want to use.

This may also be of interest:

ACDSee can change the sample text of your font.

At our site we have links to resources for all digital scrapbooking software & realize that many of you are using Photoshop Elements or Photoshop. And periodically I will come across things that look like good resources that I want to share.

This is a list of shortcuts for Photoshop that looked handy.

101 Hidden Tips & Secrets For Photoshop

and if you look at their top articles on the right, I saw this one -

How to create a transparent favicon in Photoshop

So you can make it in Photoshop & then use my instructions for getting it in your address bar.

This is the list of tutorials on our site for other programs.

In my last post I had a layout using an Out of Bounds Frame. I bought mine because it’s just easier. But if you’re interested in making your own, my friend ‘Quirky’, shared some great tutorials with me. They are made for Photoshop but I was able to translate them over to ACDSee Photo Editor, so they are very well done.

The Wonderful World of Out of Bounds, an Intro. and Frame Warping

Also the girls over at Scrapbookgraphics put out a tutorial recently too on Out of Bounds.

We also have information on disabling Organizer & minimizing slow down in PSE & PS.

I do admit that this is a shameless plug, but I am very excited to share the news with you. My layout & tutorial for creating an Out of Bounds effect is featured in ACDSee’s newsletter!

It was quite easy to do in ACDSee Photo Editor & Heidi will publish the instructions on how to do it. The tutorial & complete ACDSee newsletter can be seen here. There are also some great macro photography tips in there & a screensaver download. And you can subscribe here. I can’t wait for this summer’s round of flowers because I have a new Canon that has a great macro feature!

Credits:

Paper & elements from Zen kit by Traci Sims

Photo frame from Pop it Set 2 by Ake Pangestuti

How cute is this? Photo Editor continues to amaze me every time I scrap with it. Just listen to the techniques I used when I did this layout…

• Text on a path
• Text in a shape
• Blending modes with the two bottom paper layers
• Hue and Saturation adjustments
• Vignette
• Beveling of text

Now, guess how long it took me to do this layout- from start to finish?

Less than an hour. Yes, really! And that even includes the time it took me to find the photos I wanted to use, as well as the papers and elements and fonts. Of course, that was easy too- I use ACDSee Photo Manager, of course!

I just love this program. Photo Editor is just Packed with terrific features that make digital scrapbooking easy and fun. And that is what this hobby (passion/addiction) is all about.

Credits for layout:

White paper, Black paper, and Journal Tag: Park Avenue
Brackets, Sticker: Rosemary
Both Kits by Danielle Young from Oscraps.com
Fonts 25, and Angelina
Scrapped with ACDSee Photo Editor

Have you seen Stuffdock.com? It’s quite an interesting read! It’s a conglomeration of many blog posts from a number of people. Some are famous in the digiworld & some are like us - infamous, maybe? It’s updated daily and grabs whatever is new from whoever has blogged.

• How does it work? (I always like to know!). Each time it updates it checks to see if your RSS feed is updated (just like a blog reader). Cool eh?!

• How do you sign up? You will need your blog address (URL) & RSS feed for your blog

• Here’s how you find your RSS feed - go to your blog & click on the RSS symbol on the right side (in Firefox browser - I don’t see it in IE - sorry ladies! you just need to convert to Firefox I guess!). Then the new address is your RSS feed.

• For example ours is: http://digiscrapinfo.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2

Send those two things to dana@stuffdock.com with a friendly request & she signs you up. It’s that easy!

And people have asked me for permission to link to our blog. I just want to express that anyone is WELCOME to link to our blog every time you want! We have blinkies in our forum if you want to post on your blog to blip over to us quickly if you’re an ACDSee user.

Blogs are all about linking & backlinking. That’s most of the fun! A backlink is when Dana sees that I’ve linked to Stuffdock in this blog entry. I’m using Wordpress here (which I *heart* by the way) and Technorati shows me all the blogs linked to our blog.

So leave a comment with your blog’s address if you want to join our blogroll. The more the merrier!

If you’d like to receive our blog by email, it’s easy to sign up on the top right.

Early on I dubbed myself the techno-librarian and I do plenty of searches for people. Six years ago I started a tradition at the library of bringing in a book character mascot once a year. We take a photo of each child with the character (this year it was Curious George!) and I had some brave volunteers that served banana splits to preschoolers! The photos are a marketing tool that brings the families back to the library to pick up their free photo. And it brings joy to people too!

So 300 people, 150 photos & 5 pails of ice cream later….. I had a bunch of photos to deal with. In just 20 minutes flat, I was able to crop & edit 150 photos in ACDSee Photo Manager 9! I used to upload them to Shutterfly, then try to decide which ones to keep & not. (sometimes I take more than one shot if their expression wasn’t good).

So do you want to see what my day job is all about?

I want to give a big welcome to our new bloggers! Heidi & I have been blogging & you’ve probably noticed that we have our own style. So we’re going to mix it up a bit & add some more voices.

Petra is from the Netherlands & is a very talented scrapper. She has started using ACDSee Photo Editor & is doing great things with it! We look forward to seeing her layouts & having her blog with us. Petra has a great blog of her own.

I’ll let the other person introduce themselves - we’ll see if she comes to blog.

If you are enthusiastic about organizing, digiscrapping information, and ACDSee products then maybe you would like to blog with us? Use the contact us link & let us know why & maybe we’ll sign you up!

Many digital scrapbooking sites have a category where people tell where they’re from. So Heidi & I put up a fun interactive map. Is this not the coolest thing you’ve ever seen? You can put a pin in your location & upload your avi.

Show us here on our map where you’re at - I put instructions on the page.

It’s great fun to see where everyone is from!

Show us here on our map where you’re at - I put instructions on the page.

Ok here it is…My opinion on their easy to use, neat,
almost the same as PSP, photo editor!!

A couple of weeks ago I had installed some brushes in
my PSP X and after that I didn´t work anymore…
well it does, but it takes like forever to load them and
then all of the sudden, it´s gone!

Then I remembered I still had a download for ACDSee
photo editor and decided to use it right away! With
the little help from a couple of tuts from digiscrapinfo,
I figured it out pretty fast! It was so easy!! It does
the same things my psp does only so much faster!!
Since it doesn´t take a lot of working space! Now
with ACDSee photo manager & photo editor it
really saves me more then half the time!
And I love it!!!!

Things I like about it:
- it makes layers easy
- assigning things in groups; as exsample with
alpha´s, you can all resize/move them at once. This
also works when you have a couple of photos that
you all want in the same sizes!
- text on paths; is has a awsome feature that after
you´ve put your text in there, you can easily put them
on a path/curve. And it only took me like 1 minute!!
- It´s very simple to make vignettes
- And best of all is that it doesn’t require a huge
amount of RAM

Well, I know there are a lot more, but since I´m only
using it for a two weeks, I still have to figure it out!!
But already loving this editor!!

Here are two of my pages, using ACDSee´s photo
editor…

Here´s my Fiancé and his new & first glasses. He
needed them or a while now and finally got a pair last
month. I think he looks great with them! As you can
see I used the text on a path feature and it was a
piece of cake! Credits can be found here

This is my colleague’s little boy Ruben…he goes
to my group at daycare and he’s such an cutie and
always an happy little boy! Credits can be found here

This program is really easy to use for beginners or
advanced scrappers. And one thing I also like is that
Connie & Heidi have made some great tutorials to
help you out!! Like for using a template, photo
extractions, basic scrapbook functions and I know
there are more in the making!
You can check those out over here

If you have some more questions about it, please
ask!! Thanks for reading, Petra