*** IN THIS ISSUE ***

– Providing Training with Slide Shows
– Call for Writers and PodCast Guest Appearances
– What is RSS and Why You Should Offer It
– Notes from Paint Chip

Providing Training with Slide Shows

Providing training for your customers is a service well worth investing time and money into. If your customers don’t know how to use your products, they aren’t as likely to purchase them.

There are many ways to provide training. Methods include classes delivered via a chat room, downloadable documents similar to the pdf file you received when you signed up for our business reports, forum and blog entries too. This is not an all inclusive list of the ways to deliver lessons. It’s merely a mini-accounting of the most popular formats I’ve seen in digi-scrap community websites.

One method that I’ve seen used often in the business environment and school settings, rather than in community forums is online slide presentations. These presentations are created using the popular MS Office Power Point software product.

Using this product you can build a tutorial that includes animated text features, slide transitions, screen clips and other graphics, and even voice over audio. Once your presentation is created you can then save it in the appropriate file format, upload it to your own web site servers, or to a public server. Then link your customers to the slide show lesson.

There are several websites offering hosting services for this type of product. Some of the benefits of this type of delivery method include:
– Giving your customers something uniquely different from what other sites are currently offering.
– Visual and audio learning opportunity.
– By using one of the websites that provide this service you can expose your training (and product information) to a wider audience using free server space that also includes built in networking/advertising opportunities through their community and their tagging systems.

I don’t vouch for any of these sites specifically, however here’s a list of the websites I found that offer slide show hosting. Most of them are provided at no or low cost: http://www.slideshare.net/; http://www.authorstream.com/; http://www.screencast.com/

You can make slide presentations with nothing other than what’s included with every version of Windows XP or Vista too. Simply use the Windows Movie Maker package. You can pick up more info on how to do that from: http://www.absoluteppt.com/movie/ppt-to-youtube-moviemaker/index.html

Consider using this same method to build a promotion campaign for your services or products. You can find an example of how one scrapbooker did it listed in our Blog Carnival info article.

Call for Writers and PodCast Guest Appearances

Want to share your experience with others, grow your circle of business peers, and increase your site traffic? Joint venture with DSD-Pro and we’ll share the wealth with you, with no money coming out of your pocket at all!

We’re looking for high-quality articles from digi-scrappers who want to share their knowledge with peers and business associates. Be one of our guest writers and get some link love sent back your way!

We’re also going to start our “Interviews with the Experts” in September. Grab this opportunity to show your level of expertise by participating in a Pod-Cast interview.

Get more info about being our next Featured Guest by viewing our guest info page.

What is RSS and Why You Should Offer It

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. This is a method used to subscribe to a website feed so you don’t have to go visit the website to read the latest content. Instead of going to each of your favorite sites individually you can collect all the RSS feeds of each of these sites, and consolidate them into what’s called a feed reader. Having all this info in one place makes it more efficient for you to take in all your favorite content in less time! This is one of the reasons you want to offer RSS to your customers. To help them make better use of their time.

But there’s another reason why you should be including it on your websites. Because for every feed reader you have… you have a potential customer to advertise to. It’s not hard to find out how many subscribers you have. Many online businesses use a special third party service called FeedBurner that adds extra features to the feed. The most important of which is that it provides these statistics I mentioned as well as some handy tools for you to use when posting your feed on your website - and it’s free of charge too!

Remember, the number of feed subscriptions you have tells you how many people are visiting your website and how often. What a powerful set of data for you to have when testing marketing campaigns, selling advertising on your website, and launching a new product line! Why would you not include your RSS feed on your website?

RSS feeds are not limited to blogs; many webspace owners provide feeds for their website and almost any media content online such as music, video, and audio files have RSS capability too! If you want to know all the techy parts about what’s going on behind the scenes of an RSS feed, simply run a web search using the term “syndication RSS feed”. You will get more information than you can handle in one day.

There are basically two options available to you when it comes to reading feeds. You can purchase software, install it on your computer and read your feeds from there or you can use an online feed reader and then view your information from any computer you are using to connect to the web. My preferred method is this second option because I can quickly skim through my feeds while sitting at an airport or the local coffee shop, while in front of any computer that has access to the internet!

You can learn more about the two feed reader options and how they differ, by clicking over to our RSS information page at DSD-Pro. You can also learn how to subscribe to the DSD-Pro RSS feeds from this same article.

All blogs have this RSS capability. Many of your customers now expect to see it on your website in plain view. If you aren’t
putting in top right corner of your blog - you are missing out on capturing some new potential customers. If you aren’t including it on your website at all - I can guarantee, you are losing some of your readership. I’m not alone when I say I use my RSS feed far more than I click around to the websites I track. If I found your site, but I didn’t find an RSS feed… it’ll be a long time before I return! So make your feed easy to find and very obvious to your readers!

An added note here - RSS feeds are sometimes listed on websites with links titled Atom, or Syndicate, but they all do the same thing.

Remember - busy web surfers use RSS feeds to make their life easier and access the info much quicker. Business-bloggers use them to offer a service to their readers AND to track stats for marketing, etc. If you have a business blog and you aren’t using your RSS feed… well shame on you!

I encourage you to dig up the information on how to set up the RSS on your website so your readers can find it and subscribe right away!

Notes from Paint Chip

I wanted to end this first issue of our Business Report with an open invitation to our subscribers. An invite to join the Business Association Pre Launch Announcements List. We are preparing to launch this special project filled with tutorials, peer coaching, tons of information directed at digital scrapbooking professionals. For more information about our progress, just bounce over to our pre-launch blog UPDATE: We recently updated our info and you can now join our forum through the Business Association membership at http://dsd-pro.com/association. I do hope you’ll join us!

Consider subscribing to the RSS feed if you never want to miss an announcement about the association!

That’s it for our first business reports briefing. I do hope this issue gave you something new to think about for your scrappy business! Now as our granddaughter would say…. this is the “for really” end.

Very Respectfully,
Cindy Angiel (aka - Paint Chip)
paintchip[at]dsd-professionals[dot]com