Marketing has it’s challenges, but it can be a lot of fun too! What I’ve found interesting is how it translates into online opportunities that you can easily use to your advantage. So here’s a new series on branding. I really enjoy creating the series, I hope that you find them helpful!

What is branding? Brands are important to products & yes, even people. It’s the connection we make with a symbol, logo, font, color, etc that makes us think of that product. Think of Coca-Cola, Campbell soup label, Heinz, etc and you know what I mean. Did you know that there are fonts associated with movie titles? There’s a Harry Potter font there too at Simply the Best fonts. (and they’re free! everyone can always use more fonts… and remember that you can use them in ACDSee Photo Manager even if they’re not installed).

Think about some of your favorite sites & does their logo come to mind? When you see DST, 2peas, SBB - do you recognize the acronyms? Can you see their logo in your mind’s eye?

Here at DigiScrapInfo.com we’ve been using this for a logo:

Logos are symbols or slogans that say a lot about your site/business. When you create yours think about the message & how will people perceive it? Does it represent your business & your personality? Is it easy to remember? There are lots of questions to consider. Should you make it or hire someone? It’s a valuable part of your investment. This is the time to be unique.

Once you have decided on one, repeat it. Put it everywhere you get the opportunity to. The repetition will make it more effective. For example, we have our website name on the header of every tutorial because we want people to remember how to find us again. I’ll be talking about repetition more - it’s the most key point in branding your site & yourself. Wait til you see how many ways it’s possible to do so!

You may also be interested in our Marketing Forums series. It has information about setting up a site & getting the forums hopping.

Do you just keep saving files & pretty soon things are out of hand?  On the weekend I took some time to sort thru a bunch of folders & organized the files by topic.  (Now I probably won’t be able to find anything!)  Hopefully it will save time.

Then I decided to catch up on my blog reading & came across this post:

Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive How to Do Email and RSS Just Once a Day ? and Boost Productivity in the Process «

Yeah, uh huh … how to do email once a day & boost productivity!  So that sucked me in & I thought I would share it with you.  RSS (blog reading) doesn’t affect my time management because I catch up on blogs about once a week.  After reading that though, I pared down my blogs in my reader down to a manageable amount based on:

• how often I read the blog
• the content of the blog - do most posts hold my attention?

 Then I attacked my email:

• I started scrolling & instead of deleting, I would unsubscribe if it was a newsletter.  Then I searched & deleted all old ones from that source.
• As I moved down thru my email, I was able to wipe out a lot of ‘junk’ that way.  And hopefully turned much of it off.  I kept the ones that I read.
• I have folders set up in Thunderbird which I love & would die without.  (If you want to use Thunderbird to read your Google mail in it, I have some news coming for you on that)

Now, I’m a fairly organized person & LOVE how Evernote keeps my lists & life in order, so I consider myself fairly ok in that respect.  But I’m not sure I could survive by reading email only once a day!  ack!!  But they do have some good ideas there. 

Web Worker Daily is a nifty blog & I thought many of you may like it since that describes you!  Did you notice that they don’t mention IM, can we say Hello!?  *grin*  I love being interrupted by my friends on Hello & even ACDSee questions. 

So does anyone do email only once a day?  Would you find that challenging? or could you go cold turkey… I mean adjust?  I’m curious to hear your thoughts!  How do you keep your desktop & email organized?  Is it a struggle or do you have a great system?

This past week a reader asked: I have just started blogging and I was wondering if you might be able to address the topics of tagging and trackbacks. I don’t think I understand them or know how to go about using them!

The question doesn’t ask about categories, but for me tags & categories are related. They are important to your readers in two very different ways.

Categories are used internally on your blog. When I write a blog post I assign it to a category or two. For example this, will go under Blog Marketing. The categories that you choose help your readers find all the information that you’ve written about a certain topic quickly. After 5 months I went back thru & redid all of our categories because our topics shifted to what people were interested in. Then we added two newsletters with distinctively different focuses.

Tip on categories - Did you know that you can click on any of the terms in our category cloud on the right? Try it! When you set up your blog, you can offer your readers a list or a cloud. In the cloud the topics with more items are represented by the larger type.

Tags are used ‘externally’ when people search. When you assign tags, they are used by Google & other search engines to find your blog. (They become a part of the metadata. Metadata is simply information including the title & tags which are descriptive. You can read more about tags on Wikipedia). So it’s helpful to assign tags that are relevant so that a person searching can find your post. For example, if you had a layout in your blog post using a designer’s kit, it would be helpful to put that designer’s name as a tag.

Trackbacks are a part of a bigger idea all related to linking to your blog post. (I was reading about trackbacks on wikipedia & just learned the difference between terms that I had been interchanging.). The general term is Linkbacks & it’s simply notification that your blog has been linked on somewhere else. And there can be two types of Linkbacks - trackbacks & pingbacks:

• Trackbacks are from another blog - someone has linked to your blog post on their blog (your blogging software ‘notices’ that & generates a ‘trackback’ as a comment). As a good blogger you want to know what people are saying about you, so you follow the trackback by clicking on it in the comment section or from the email & go see what people are saying about your blog. Then, you can leave a comment on their blog. The whole purpose is to further the conversation & build community amongst bloggers who are talking about similar topics by linking them together. It’s a great way to find new blogs to read!
• Here’s an example of a trackback from my post on Live Writer. The first one is a comment & the 2nd is a trackback from James Key Lim’s blog. You can see his post here. Now he will get a trackback from me because I’m linking to his blog. (James also has a cool site called Tellfriends.com) You can set up your blog to notify you of trackbacks by email, just like you get comment notifications.

Here is where we enabled trackbacks & pingbacks in Wordpress (you can see the tabs):

• Pingbacks are linking to previous blog articles that you’ve written. This is extremely helpful to bring older material to the reader’s attention. Maybe they’ve recently started reading your blog & aren’t aware of a related article that you previously posted? So, when I publish that post, I get an email notification of the pingback. And that is also noted in the comment section of the older post.
• This is easy to tell that it’s a pingback because it’s linked from our blog rather than another blog. I wrote a post on Choosing a DSLR camera & linked back to my article on ACDSee’s Pro 2 software. You can see the pingback there.

So, in review, categories are for the reader’s use on the blog, tags help the reader find your blog. Tracksbacks are created when someone links to your blog & pingbacks are generated when you link to previous posts in your blog. These may or may not show up depending on if you’ve turned on the notification. (And I’ve created a # of pingbacks here which will generate some email back to me )

The first question will be ‘Does Blogger support trackbacks?” because I’m getting to know you guys! So I checked into that (just for you!). And it doesn’t, but I found a workaround but it requires the use of Firefox (which you REALLY should be using anyway!). If someone gets it to work, please let us know! Maybe Hummie will experiment with this? (She’s my techie friend that made the really cool Digiscrapping Blogroll on the right - it’s just so spiffy! thank you dear!! Get one for your blog too! - ah! I created another trackback!!

And I really do enjoy researching these types of things, so keep asking questions!

I love plays on words & that suited me.  Today I’m going to link you to ideas for organizing Actions and I’m going to tell you about my own organizing efforts.  Hopefully it will help me to be more efficient so I have more time to blog!   

What are Actions?   Actions are used in Adobe Photoshop & Photoshop Elements.  They are a set of steps that are ‘recorded’ or saved & can be used over again & again.  The advantage is that it’s a one click effect that initiates any number of steps to achieve the same goal each time.  For Paint Shop Pro, the equivalent is Scripts.  ACDSee Photo Editor has built in photo adjustments that allow you options for adjusting your photos by selecting from options

Because I don’t use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, I’m going to link you to my friend Hummie’s blog.  She outlines her ideas for organizing her Actions.  She also links to her tutorial for converting Photoshop Actions so that they can be used in Photoshop Elements.  So if you’re like Hummie & need to get your Actions in order, then try her suggestions:

Hummie’s World: Organizing Actions in PSE 

This week when I was looking for something else, another suggestion for organizing Actions were different, so I’ll link you to Katherine’s way too. 

And since I don’t have Adobe Actions, I was working on my own organizing.  I’ve had my laptop for 8 months & last night spent time organizing all my doc’s & files.  What a good feeling!  So today I rewarded myself by installing 8 plugins for Window Live Writer.  I will play with them & let you know which are worthwhile.  And I have a list of ideas to blog about.  My next thing is to try to get my blog reader feeds pared down to what I actually read!  It must be a laptop housecleaning weekend! (It’s certainly not happening in my house! )

Since I’m rambling I’ll wrap it up with sharing the crazy thing I did on Thursday night - I bought two domain names.  Now I used to splurge on paper slabs… did I need them, no?  but I bought them anyway.  So now I’ve moved on to buying domain names … I think I’m a geek now officially!  (maybe you had noticed this already?!).  So if any of you wanted  conniebensen.com sorry! it’s taken… and I bought another, but I’ll blog on that one later.  What to do with them?  Well, I’ll have to rely on my sister for that. 

One of the joys of blogging is that we hear from you, our readers!  So, what comes in our email?

1. Questions & suggestions:

• Are you wondering about something?  Feel free to email us or leave a comment in regard to topics that you’d like us to blog about. 
• And if you’re looking for software or an application to make life easier, make that request too! (that’s how I found Live Writer)
• If you have a topic that you’d like to write a guest blog post for us - DO let us know!

2.  Requests to do chats - here are some answers to questions in that regard

• Yes! we are available to do chats & we’d like to have two weeks advance notice

3.  Questions about ACDSee products & their use

• Ask away!  One of us will answer as soon as possible
• We also create tutorials on demand.   

4.  Notes of thanks - we received this one this week & we are glad that our information is helpful.  It’s wonderful to hear how you’re using the web tools that we blog about!  It’s our readers that make the digiscrapping community great!  Dalynn gave me permission to share her note of thanks about the information in our post about wiki’s. 

I’ve been heading up a big ‘Yearbook Project’ for my homeschool group (about 60 families) and had recruited several new digital scrapbookers from that group to do the pages.  We scrambled to collect photos from all the families of our events over the past year. We divvied up all the pages  we each were going to do. But it was such a pain trying to keep organized just using the Yahoo group we had created for the group.

Then came along your article about WIKIs. WOW! I watched that video and couldn’t wait to sign up for one for our group. It is much more efficient. I’m sure it saves me literally hours a week!
Several other articles have been very enlightening and wonderful too.  Anyway, I just wanted to let you both know how much I appreciate all you are doing with your website!

This Yearbook project is almost finished and I will be able to get back to regular scrapbooking soon, I hope…
Dalynn
(Daly at DST)

The great thing about the web is that you meet wonderful people & they are willing to share their knowledge!  I love learning from others.  Katie & I bumped into each other long ago because we’re both librarians.  When I saw her excitement about having found this software, I asked if she would write a blog post for our Mac friends.  So, thank you Katie for sharing!

This was written by Katie, aka stampnbug

I am a Mac user through and through, but have been so envious of PC users because of their ability to use ACDSee to organize their digital scrapping supplies. I tried organizing in iPhoto, using Adobe Bridge, keywording and then using Spotlight (a Mac feature)?none of these options really fitted my needs.

Recently, My Digital Muse wrote about Shoebox in their latest newsletter. I decided to give it a try. Shoebox is a browser, which allows you to tag (categorize/assign keywords) your supplies. I found it very intuitive and easy to use. I am a still in the process of tagging my supplies, so by no means am I an expert at using this program, but I wanted to share what I have learned so if there are other Mac digital scrappers who might want to try this software.

There are two important things to consider before you begin tagging:

• you need to think for a moment how you would like to organize your supplies so that you can set up your categories. I found the organizing styles page at DigiScrapInfo to be very helpful
• you do not want to move files around once you begin tagging (or paths will be broken) so make sure you files are arranged in a way that you like

You are now ready to begin tagging?quite the undertaking I am finding!

A few tips in regards to tagging:

• you can assign as many tags to each file that you want ? the tags are what will help you search for things, so I feel the more detailed the better.
• you can assign tags to more than one item at a time ? click on an item, push the shift key, and then click on another item in the row ? it will select all the items between the two you selected. OR you can click and then hold down the command key (open apple) and select items one at a time. These two options are helpful to assign tags to multiple items (i.e. ?paper? or ?brads? in a kit)

An example of tagging is listed above. This particular piece of paper is solid yellow. Above the tags is the actual file name.

Another very helpful tip:

• you can customize your toolbar. The first thing I did was add Photoshop to my toolbar so that I can very easily click on an item, then click the Photoshop button?and it will immediately open it in Photoshop.
• There are two steps to be able to add Photoshop (or any other photo editing program) to your toolbar:

1. You need to set Photoshop as your default photo editing application. To do this, go to Shoebox preferences, click the photos tab, and then where it says edit photos in choose Photoshop. Close the preference window.
2. Click the View menu, choose customize toolbar, then all you need to do is drag the Photoshop icon up to your toolbar (see my screenshot below)

There are two versions available. Shoebox Express is $29.99, which allows you to create up to two catalogs, add 10,000 photos to each catalog, and view 1,000 photos at a time. Shoebox Pro is $79.99 and allows an unlimited number of catalogs and an unlimited number of photos. Visit the Shoebox website at: http://www.kavasoft.com/Shoebox/ to learn more about the software or to download a trial version.

Kathy has a Mac blog  Digi Scrap Mac and she has info on organizing PS Actions

We also blogged about another software for Mac’s:  Graphic Converter

This is what I started with, my son’s writing about things he liked about 3rd grade:

It could work but it was very plain.

So here are some thing I did with it using ACDSee Photo Editor to make it better!

Improved the scan:

I increased the shadows/highlights to make the his pencil marking darker on the scanned copy. Pencil just doesn’t scan well.

How to:

1. Select the image
2. Choose Light | Shadow/Highlights
3. Click on the previews to make the penciled text go darker.

Highlight certain things:

This technique is kind of like using a highlighting pen. My first try I placed a paint smear across one of the lines. It added color but made the text hard to read. So here is what I did:

1. Create 2 objects of the same image by selecting the image, copying it (Ctrl-C) and pasting (Ctrl - V)
2. Selected the top object.
3. Choose the Magic Wand Tool
4. Set the Tolerance and Select Color through Image
5. 
6. Clicked on the delete key.
7. Now this deleted my paper. You can’t really tell too much because you are seeing the paper of duplicated image right underneath this image. If you click on the eye to hide the bottom image, you will see that you are just left with the text. Like in this example:
8. 
9. Line up the top text image exactly with the bottom image. To do this choose both objects, select Align in the tool bar and choose the centering button.
10. 
11. Now we are going to make a sandwich of these. The bottom layer will contain the text on the paper, then we add the highlighting (in this case colored paint smears) and then add the text only copy of the image on top.
12. 
13. Save this as a jpg to be used on a layout or what I would do is this:
    1. Select all the objects
    2. Ctrl - G to group them into one group
    3. 
    4. Select the group and copy into your layout. The whole layered group will be copied into your layout and you can work with it like one object or if need be you can expand the group and make any necessary changes. If you saved it as jpg, you don’t have this luxury of making changes.

On some pages, I didn’t use paint smears but used a highlighting box.  I basically created yellow boxes and sandwich’ed them.  You could also you the pen or marker tool and do the same thing, just like a highlighter.

Drop Shadow

Lastly I added a dark gray drop shadow to the paper image to make it more realistic. Simple select the paper image object and choose Object | Drop Shadow and choose the settings you like.

I think it looks more fun than the original.

Paint smears are by Sue Cummings Summer Camp kit an exclusive kit by ACDSee.

Not too long ago I blogged about ACDSee’s Pro 2 beta. The main difference between Photo Manager 9 & Pro 2 is that is can process RAW images. And I’ve heard people talk about how much they love doing it, so I have borrowed my sister-in-law’s camera.  Yes, I have this dslr camera sitting looking at me waiting to be used!  Today was too hot to take it outside though.

My only concern is that I’m an automatic girl.  I tend to use auto most of the time.  So if you’re considering a dslr take that into account.  I read somewhere that if you use automatic setting most of the time, the getting a dslr is probably overkill & not a good use of your money. Another thing I was concerned about was size.  But, I’m dying to try RAW, so I will!

This is an excellent article to read if you’re interested in DSLR cameras.  They talk about considering price, technology, memory cards, lenses, resolution (megapixels) and fit (body & styling). 

How to Choose your 1st DSLR

Here are some other really good articles on choosing a DSLR

How to Choose a DSLR Camera by Darren Rouse (excellent in-depth article)

Video on How to Choose a Digital SLR Camera

An excellent set of Digital Camera Reviews

After two weeks of using Live Writer I still think it’s one of the best tools ever (ok, right behind ACDSee products!). This has made blogging so easy. And your feedback was phenomenal! Up to that time I had been religiously keeping up to replying to comments … but that post max’ed our reader stats & I was deluged with great comments & requests for troubleshooting it. So I wanted to do a follow up for everyone’s benefit. First of all thank you to our readers! I so appreciate your requests for new app’s & I love searching them out & trying them. And of course we appreciate the comments!

Windows Live Writer is a beta & they have a support forum.

Some issues that came to light are:

• images aren’t supported on blogspot - blogger has an API restriction (meaning that they’re not allowing outside sources to upload images)
• images can’t be uploaded to secure ftp’s
• posting at future time isn’t working for someone, but I haven’t tested that

Overall people love the flexibility it offers & the broad range of text & image options. (I forget to use color). I’ve also been using it to compose our newsletters & then I copy & paste them into the newsletter software. It saves my draft so easily & I don’t need to browse to a file, open it, etc. Am I lazy or what?!

I want to share some of it’s features that I’m using:

• Categories can be assigned from within Live Writer
  • It learns them from your blog!
• Live Writer can be set to prompt you for Categories
  • under Tools | Options | Preferences

• Live Writer will Ping Servers for you. This means that it’s letting various sites know that you have a new or updated post.
  • Wikipedia has a list (& explanation) & I copied & pasted them in, then deleted the asterisks (not worrying about the formatting - that was fixed when I clicked on Apply)
  • under Tools | Options | Ping Servers

Have you tried any of the plug-in’s? Please share which ones you’re finding helpful. I want to get the ’snipping’ one. Do you have any other comments or issues about Live Writer?

This blog post suits digiscrapping sites SO perfectly! I notice that the most successful sites are like a party. It’s shopping, contests, games, etc 24/7! Granted there’s learning & sharing too - but, for a site to be successful, they better be having a party!

So how do you turn your forum into a party? Read Lee Lefevre’s 12 suggestions for making your party (I mean site) successful!

I love the analogies in this! The title is perfect:

Your Community is a Party Waiting to Happen Common Craft - Social Design for the Web

Do you think that his ideas suit digiscrapping sites? Did you find anything that sparked some ideas?