Adding a bit of color to your QR Codes
Posted by 
on Thursday, December 17, 2009 
at 10:27 AM 
in 
The possibilities for QR Codes to help increase the impact and effectiveness of printed materials continues to increase.
Of course, the QR Code is not the one and only solution. For a marketing or educational effort to work, you still must consider the message, the design, and the target audience.
To help you with the design portion, we recently released an enhancement that allows to generate QR Codes in various colors.
For example if you are creating a QR Code for your company, make it the company colors. Or if you are designing a holiday card you can make your QR Code red or green.
Standard black-and-white QR Codes may allow people to respond to your printed pieces – however, adding color to your QR Codes may be necessary to ensure your creative design can truly come to life. A QR Code in the right color(s) can enhance a printed piece and complement it. Designers put a lot of thought into the placement and colors in their designs and this is just one more way the QR Code can truly be incorporated as part of the design.
Check out how you can make your own QR Codes today at QReateAndTrack.com. And while you are there check out some of the other useful tools that we just added like the ability to make QR Codes all different sizes and at 300 DPI high-resolution image.
Be creative, you have a lot of colors to choose from.
Tags New QR Code Screencast Up on YouTube
QReateAndTrack.com’s QR creator application has added some new options for you to play with when creating your next QR Code.
QR Codes now have a simpler look, can be any color you desire, and can be downloaded as 300 DPI high-resolution image, all for free!
Check out the video below to see how or head over to app.qreateandtrack.com to try it out for yourself.
For more information on QR Codes please visit www.QReateAndTrack.com
Cross-Selling in your Marketing Campaigns
There are very few marketers out in the world that will confess to having “enough time”.
Marketing departments are typically full of ideas and excitement – but they face the same clock as the rest of the world.
Their file cabinet may have marketing strategy documents… their whiteboard full of plans and action items…. and their desks may be covered in sketches.
However, the best intentions in the world do not always mean those projects will see the light of the day. Thus, when you do get a project done, you need to capitalize. Take full advantage of the content that you are pushing to the world.
Here is an example.
Contact Form and Newsletter Subscription Option
A customer recently launched a campaign that primarily consisted of a landing page with a quiz. All respondents that successfully answered the quiz were eligible for a prize.
Well, at the very bottom of the quiz, they asked people for their contact information (of course), but they also asked if people wanted to subscribe to their newsletter.
Yes, they certainly may have had other ideas for campaigns that would specifically drive newsletter subscriptions. But here, they took advantage of a campaign that did see the light of the day, and used it to also try to get people to subscribe.
Capture Screenshots Quicker and Easier with “SnagIt”
Since I’ve been working with computers I can’t imagine how many times I’ve hit that “Print screen button”… if I had a nickel 
. The print screen / screen shot key is probably one of the best features on the key board (except for Ctrl + Alt + Del of course). But as helpful as a screen shot can be to show off your software product, latest pc error message to send to IT, or your high score in Tetris it can also be time consuming to bring it into paint, photoshop, whatever you use to edit and crop it down.
So I wanted to bring attention to a piece of software I started using a few months ago to speed up my production on producing screen shots for emails, powerpoints, ect.
A program called “Snag It” by Tech Smith.
Snag It allows you to capture content on your screen in an easier way. You can select the area you want to capture by drawing a square around it instead of capturing the whole screen and cropping it down. Or select the one of your six windows open on your screen you’d like to capture. Even capture a scrolling window instead of piecing it together in an editing program.
Snag It has more options than that and you can see them in the image below but those are the most common functions I use.
Everything is also stored in your Snag It library so if you hit your screen shot key a 2nd time it won’t over ride your first screen shot. The software also allows you to do some minor editing of the images by adding drop shadows, arrows, text, call outs and more.
But you can check out all these features on their website – http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp
Tech Smith offers a free trial download so test it out and see if you like it – if you do let other’s know about your exspeirience by posting in the comments section below.
How LinkedIn Has Helped Me
Recently I was on a quest for a set of icons to use in powerpoints, software, advertisements, everything. I needed something that was sleek, up to date, descriptive but most importantly worked with print as well as web.
Finding an icon set that both offered Print and Web formats is what really was holding me back. On top of that I had no idea where to start searching. Google is always an option but I was getting sent to hundreds of sites most which kept lacking the print formatting.
So I ended up heading over to LinkedIn. I posted the following message:
This was one of my first times posting my own discussion. I posted on a Monday night and when I checked back Tuesday morning I was overwhelmed with the information I received. Not just by the large amount of comments but I received over a few dozen of personal emails with suggestions of websites, freelance designers, references, links, and more.
I was really impressed by the LinkedIn community they were kind, polite, and full of information and opinions about how they went about finding their own icon sets. I even ended up making a few LinkedIn connections in the process!
LinkedIn has completely helped me in this search I’m in the final stretch on determining where I will purchase the icons from (A site that was recommended by three responses to my posting).
On top of that LinkedIn ended up boosting interlinkONE.com’s site hits!
When taking a look at the Google Analytics for the month of August LinkedIn ranked number 3 in the “All Source Traffic” report (Right behind direct traffic to the site and google searches).
It also ranked number one in the “Reference Sites” report – Surpassing other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter that had recently been leading the pack.
So LinkedIn has helped me in two ways – Its users have educated and supported me in my journey for icons but it has also been a great way to drive traffic to interlinkONE’s website.
So if you’ve been weary of LinkedIn in the past I suggest you give it a shot for yourself and for your business.
And if you’re unsure on how to get started or what other features LinkedIn has to offer feel free to check out the “How To: LinkedIn” screen cast below.
