Stampin' Up! Consulting

It's been over a year since I started doing consulting for Stampin' Up! Demonstrators. I haven't posted much about it, but I though a summary was in order. Stampin' Up! is a direct sales company, so many of the same principals apply, with the most notable feature being that it's a visual business. Good web presence is essential!

I've done several classes in addition to my one - on -one consulations (where I do whatever my client wants to learn!):

Blogger Blogging 101
Setup & maintain your own blog using blogger (free)- you can even publish on a custom domain (www.enjoystamping.com and www.organizedstamping.com)which I pay $10 a year for (less if you register for more than a year), but get all the cost savings of using a free blogging application.

There are lots of tools and tricks available to personalizing your blog - I'll show you the basics in this class:

• Setting up your Blogger account
• Custom domain options
• Choosing a template and simple changes not requiring any HTML
• How to use Headers, Watermarks & Signatures (we don't create them)
• Working with gadgets- anything on the sidebars or footers - pictures, text, labels
• Linking - within your blog and to anywhere else
• Other tips & tricks

Blogger Blogging 201
Learn about:

• Optimize for Search Engine Visibility (Tips)
• Paypal (get paid for classes online), Feedburner (Subscribe to your site), Feedjit (who's visiting), Link within (get people to click deeper into your blog)
  
• Using Google docs to link to custom documents & forms
• Setting up google analytics go give you more insight into how people find you and where they go
  
• Other useage, editing and Maintanance Tips and Tricks

Bookkeeping for Demonstrators

• Together with my upline Josee Smuck (#1 Canadian Demonstrator in 2010!) I developed Stampers Profit Pal, an excel spreadsheet based file to help you conquer your finances. Do you know if you are profitable? Do you sweat when your husband asks you for your numbers at tax time? Check out www.Stampersprofitpal.com for more details!

Using a custom domain name with Blogger

Using a custom domain with your Blogger account is easy and cheap. Instead of using a URL with .blogspot in it, choose your own domain name and 'publish' to it. All your extensions will be www.yourdomainname/page1 so you can link to individual pages in your blog using your cusom domain!

• If you own the domain you want already, you will have to set it up to work properly. There are several steps to follow, and they will vary slightly depending on which domain registrar you used. Some common ones are http://www.godaddy.com/ or EasyDNS. See the setup instructions for this case. Prices range a bit, but are about $10 per year. Some registrars include free email (yourname@yourdomainname.com), or other features, some don't.

• If you don't own your domain, you can register with blogger for $10 per year. In this case you don't need do any setup (they do all the CNAME & DNS record changes for you automatically). When you are logged into blogger, go to the Settings Tab > Publishing submenu and follow the instructions to publish on a custom domain. I believe the only limitiation is that you can't create an email like yourname@yourdomain.com. since it only comes with a free gmail service. (checking into this- will update when I find out for sure!)

Having your own domain is important for establishing yourself as a proper business, and for $10 a year, who can go wrong?

Need help doing this? I have a 5 page document with pictures of every step . Contact me today !

Summer Camp Registration & Administration

Problem: Create a less time consuming way of processing and handling registration, daily class lists including allergies and name labels for a Summer Camp. This used to be done manually, typing in registrant information - about twenty fields including name, address, emergency contact info- from a paper registration into a table in word. Then the info was manually copy/pasted to create class lists and labels for up to 150 kids each day.

My Solutions:

Online Registration

1. Use Google Spreadsheet & Forms to create a online registration form that can be linked to from the organizations main page. The data for each child registered flow to a google spreadsheet.

Excell Master List

1. Using the export funtion from google, the data can be copied and pasted into the 'master' list- a excell spreadsheet which has been formatted to have the same column headers, making data compatible.
2. I used excell's 'List' capability to be able to sort and filter the data by column by the criteria within it- for example, the Class column can be sorted to show just the SK or Grade 1s, so that a list of registered campers can be printed per class- of course any other relevant columns can be printed as well! Sorting by Allergy gives the kitchen staff a list of kids for whom they need to prepare special food.

Printing Name Tags

1. Avery has a great tool that you can download for free to make all sorts of labels with a few clicks. It works for data in excell or in a word document. You simply filter and select the data you want to be able to print and follow the simple wizard to select the type of label, arrange how the info will be displayed (just like in Word) and create your merged data labels. Voila; Class, Name & Allergy labels which the kids will wear everyday, created and printed in a few minutes!

Training Time: about 2 hours!

Updates to Love Ottawa

We have made a few changes- Instead of using a blogger site, I switched to a google site and embedded the volunteer driver form in one of those pages. Stuart Miles did an excellent job creating a banner and tweaking the pages, including a 'Spread the Word' page with print media attachments for others to use. I registered the domain name http://www.loveottawa.org/ through godaddy.com and forwarded it to my created google site so that we had a simple and recognizable domain.

Another problem we were facing is how to easily see all available drivers for a given time period- and another great product- google calendar became our answer. Again, I embedded the google calendar on our internal site (the one only call center folks can access) and we came up with a visual system for booking drivers. All together- a pretty slick system- especially considering all the tools were free!

Love Ottawa- Ride Program

The last few days I've been working on a database system for co-ordinating volunteer drivers for Seniors who are stranded by the Bus Strike here in Ottawa. Time was of the essence, so I used Googles free tool to quickly build the system. It works like this:

1. I used Google Documents to create a form to collect potential volunteer drivers information and availability. The form has text & dropdown choices to make data uniform. The backend spreadsheet is only accessible by login and permission. The driver's reference will be checked before being approved.

2. I then created a Blogger site (http://www.blogger.com/) and choose the minimal template. To create a very simple blog that is available to the public. I removed all of the gadgets and expanded the blog width to create a simple, clean layout. Using the 'embed document' feature from google docs I then ' posted' the form on the blogger site, so potential volunteers can enter their information right there. We can redirect from a custom domain name at a later time if we want to.

3. Finally I created a database using Google Sites (http://www.sites.google.com/ ) , accessible only by permission for the call center use both for entering driver requests from seniors and for finding a matching referenced driver. Co-ordinators can sort the database by area and day/time to find a matching driver. Both the driver and seniors records are then edited to track the match.

That's the system in a nutshell! I'm sure there will be lots of little tweaks along the way, but the framework is all done!

Cost for tools: $0.00 and about 6 hours of my time.

Other Uses for this type of system: co-ordinating people, scheduling, surveying