Click-to-Website Business Cards

Authors, Small Business Owners, Educators, 

Concept: Add a QR (Quick Response) Code to your business card and direct people INSTANTLY to your article, your novel, your website, your linkedin page. 

The "Back Story":  We fell in love with Newport Beach from the moment we visited there several years ago. We positioned ourselves to live and do our business in one of the most beautiful areas in California.  How?  We live in an RV resort and write and do business from there! It's lively, it's fun. It's blocks from the ocean. People are always on vacation and they come from all over the country.  Because we experienced Newport Beach as a non-native, I was discovering great spots that every visitor would want to experience.  So I wrote a one-day, do-it-yourself itinerary for newcomers and visitors to the area.  Everytime we met a new person at our resort, I'd ask them if they had seen the view from Corona del Mar or Crystal Cove yet.  I'd tell them about the Balboa Island Fun Zone Tour, and then direct them to my article which was on a website with a long URL. It was too "hit" and "miss" to explain to people where to go, but my husband suggested that if we printed the QR code right on our business card, we could show them the article in an instant. 

How It Works: With a QR code on your business card, your customers, readers, students, clients, etc. can scan the image with their smartphone and go straight to the page you want them to.!  It works well.  If your customer doesn't know how to use a QR scanner, just direct them to  Free Apps for QR Scanner that are available for iOS and Android devices in their respective app stores.  We don't know if one is better than the other, but here's the one we use on our Android phone:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kaspersky.qrscanner

How to Create the QR Image: There are several websites that will do that for free, like this one: http://www.qrcode-monkey.com/

Tips: 

• You might want to use an image bigger than the one we did because the QR Scanner app has to focus and re-focus to resolve the image when it's too small.
• Since your customer will probably go right to your website on his cell, be sure your website looks great on a mobile app.  I had some extraneous pictures on my "What to See in the OC" article which were cumbersome in the mobile version, so I moved them around to look good both on the web and on the mobile app. 

Note:  If you want to see how this works, you can simply hold your phone and scan my business card with your cellphone and my article at http://billiekelpin.hubpages.com/hub/Trippin-in-LA-What-to-See-in-the-OC will appear in a flash on your phone. If you have questions, just email leftpawedpuppy@gmail.com with "OR" question in the subject line, or leave a comment here :) 

Focus, Focus, Focus

Cheers from Billie, the Prez:

Such a long time it's been since posting!  The cause? -My personal lack of focus and eclectic interests and pursuits. Perhaps you can learn from our mistakes here at Language Rocks. I get great comfort from a quote I read on despair.com: "Maybe the sole purpose of my existence is to be a warning to others. So here's the warning: FOCUS! FOCUS! FOCUS!.
I recently joined the OC Writers group and  was struck by the focus of Dr. Diane Rogers, the author of "Stand Tall Growing the Courage To Be Uniquely You"  With laser-like focus on the promotion of her lovely and important children's book, Dr. Rogers has spoken to hundreds of children about the message of her book.  She conducts art workshops with the children, exploring all kinds of creative possibilities to put her self-published book in front of the market for which the book is geared.  Of course, one can never do that unless they have a passionate belief in the importance of their "product" to the consumer.  Dr. Rodgers is not about the sale of her book as much as she is about spreading the message of empowerment that the book bestows on it's young readers. Belief in the benefit your product is to others is most likely the strongest motivator for FOCUS!

By contrast (and here's "the warning to others"), once I wrote and published "Lucky, the Left-Pawed Puppy" in paperback and print book form, I went on to 39 other projects - not a great plan. 

So let's toast today, dear business reader, "To "Focus  Focus, Focus!" - especially this week - all the way to Friday. I'd love to hear the great results you experienced. 

Cheers from "on the road" - our summer business endeavor. More about that in the next blog :)  

Scheduling Google Adwords Driving You Crazy?

If you've just started your small business and are new to Google Adwords, I'm going to talk to you like the grandma who says, "Back in my day, I had to walk 10 miles to school in the snow without boots..." And yes, that's exactly how it felt as a small (let's face it 'tiny') business person trying to put an ad up in Google Adwords a few tears ago. My mantra at the time was: "How can the best search engine people in the world get this interface so messed up?"  My software engineer husband couldn't figure it out either, however, living with a left-brain thinker helped me analyze exactly was some of the problems were. A large part of the confusion for me was a question of semantics. While "campaign" may make sense in the software and advertising world, it made no sense in mine.  Differentiating a "campaign" from a plain old "new ad" threw me.  In addition, Ad Words must have gotten some perverse pleasure in hiding the "keyword" button and it usually took it a half an hour to locate it.  But you can thank me for writing tons of "feedback" emails to adwords that minced no words to google.  (I'm sure it was totally my personal input that created a better interface today, but we just can't prove that ;)  


 LINGERING PROBLEM TODAYLet's assume the above problems described in the paragraph above are not problems for you.  However, I guarantee that if you're new to Google Adwords you will have trouble scheduling an end date for your d"campaign".  This posting is devoted to helping you put an end date on the ad you're creating so you are not shocked three days after posting that your ad cost you three times the amount you intended. There is one simple setting to change when starting "a new campaign"  Be sure that you CHANGE the setting from Standard to All Features.  The setting All Features will allow you to see the Scheduling choice toward the bottom of the page and you'll be able to set the end date.  If you click on "Help" and search for "schedule end date" you'll be presented with a video that explains this process in depth. You can also go to this Google Adwords resource page.  The video is right in the middle  Good Luck!

New Business Owners - Choose Your Name Wisely

We've been on the web for over 15 years creating educational learning games and activities as well as producing educational software matching games for schools, especially schools that have special programs for deaf and hard of hearing students. 

Windmill Works was the name we chose for our company for a very sentimental reason:  "Man of La Mancha" was released the year that I first decided to re-create the card game, "Authors."  My card game, "American Authors," was modeled after the fun card game by Whitman Publishers that I had played as a child.  Since we knew reviving this game might be an "Impossible Dream," and since the Don Quixote character in "Man of La Mancha" was stabbing at windmills, bells and whistles started sounding and Windmill Works was born.  It's too back the bells weren't of the alarm type that indicated that since many places on the web still list companies alphabetically, "W" might be a bit ill advised.   

Once you start with a logo and business cards, it's difficult to deviate from your name even though you may have branched out into a whole new line of products since the inception of your company.

And thus, today, we struggle to convert our Windmill Works website to Language Rocks.  All of our url addresses to pages on our former website, and believe me, there are pages that even I don't remember having created, would have to be sold if we sold our name.  Since our goal is to move toward that end, we have spent the last 6 months re-doing, re-constructing, re-inventing our website.  We're exhausted! So while you don't have a crystal ball, make sure your name and the domain names you purchase and pages you create on the web with them will be pertinent in the future.

Well, now it's back to the painful re-construction at Language Rocks which, for the time being, is a division of Windmill Works.  I hesitate to link to our site at this moment in time because what you'll see is a version of spring cleaning where everything has been pulled out of the closet, is strewn in heaps on the floor, with only a bit having been put back to it's newly organized state.  Well, embarrassment be damned, you can take a look at a work in progress at www.windmillworks.com or www.languagerocks.com.  Our ebook website should be fairly intact at www.leftpawedpuppy.com

Best to you and Happy New Year!,

Billie

Best to you.