I want to welcome everybody to the December 2012 CopyDoodles Power U Training Webinar. If this is the first time you’re joining me, these are very quick webinars. It’ll be over before you know it, but the point of that is it’s a real quick shot of information and techniques, and it also gives anybody who wants to raise a question the opportunity to pose a question to me live, and I’ll do my best to answer that. That’s the purpose of these webinars – quick, quick tutorial on something CopyDoodles specific, and the opportunity for you guys, if you’d like to ask me a question, or a couple of questions, if you would like.

I also want to let everybody know the December DoodleDigest is available, and you should have all gotten that link, or log in and grab it from the CopyDoodles Access Club.

What I thought I would do this month, as I was thinking about this, you know it’s kind of the time of year where you start – I have Christmas music playing all the time now, I’ve always enjoyed Christmas music, so I have Pandora on my computer and I just play Christmas music. It’s the kind of time of year where I’m working hard, but I also realize, like here on the East Coast, and I know there’s a couple of us here on this webinar, it’s 60-some odd degrees today, it’s ridiculous. Last week at this time it was snowing, and now it’s 60 degrees.

So, you want to lighten up, so I thought rather than an in-depth training this month, what I thought I would do is show you some of the new content that we have just uploaded for you. And then, specifically, show you how you can use one of the new types of Doodles, which is brand new, and how you can have a little bit of fun with that here in the Christmas and holiday season.

The updates that we’re giving you this month, we’ve uploaded – and I’m going to show all of this here in a second – we’ve uploaded a bunch of new Christmas and holiday Text Doodles, a bunch of holiday and Christmas Shape CopyDoodles.

You may have caught wind recently of a new product that I just released called SimplePURLs. Well, as part of that product we created a unique set of PURL – by the way PURLs stand for personalized URLs, which are personalized hyperlinks that drive people to their own websites, unique to them. So, we created a bunch of  special PURL Doodles for our SimplePURLs subscribers, and I uploaded those to the CopyDoodles Access Club.

And this is very cool, I’m going to show you this, we have these brand new Overlay Doodles, we’ve never done that before. It was an experiment, and hopefully I’ll see some cool marketing from some of you, and we’ll show you how to use those.

And then we uploaded a bunch of Comics, the coffee-spill comics, and I’ll give some ideas on how you can use those.

Let’s get started here, I’m just going to jump right into the CopyDoodles Access Club. I’ve already logged in. Everyone should be aware of a couple of things right from the get-go. First of all, down here under ‘Announcements’ is where we post, for example, the latest DoodleDigest, which you can click on, you can get the latest comic guide right here. So, that’s just kind of an area where if you’re not familiar with it, you should be kind of looking there as you log in.

Now, the other area you want to look at is right here, ‘View Latest Content’. My goal is always to add good quality content as frequently as I can, typically it’s about once a month, or thereabouts. And this month I just want to show you all the good stuff that we have given you, just in time for your holiday marketing. I’m just going to kind of go through this.

The first thing you’ll see, and by the way, all of this is keyword searchable, so you can type in ‘Christmas,’ and ‘Hanukkah,’ or whatever it might be, and whatever Doodles are related will pop up.

But, these first ones might be kind of a little different looking, and they are, these colored ones here are our Overlay Doodles.

Now does anyone remember – I was thinking about this – this morning as I was thinking about this webinar – does anybody remember Colorforms? You know when you were a kid you may have had a toy called Colorforms, and they were these little adhesive things that you could stick on pictures of people, and you could put hats on them, and ears—yeah, so Debra remembers. Thank you, Debra. And, that’s what gave me this idea.

What you can do is download – let’s say we want to download Santa’s beard. And, I’m going to download that to a folder on my hard drive. And – oh, Mario still has these. You’re probably still playing with those too, Mario, right? Colorforms – they’re probably classic now. So, you can do these different ones here, and I think this one here – I think that’s Rudolph’s nose.

But, here’s what you can do with these, so I just downloaded a couple…

Now for those of you who are familiar with photo editing packages like Photoshop, or Paint, you can easily go into one of those photo image-type programs and start layering. But, what I did here is I’m just in Microsoft Word, and I just dropped a photo of me in there, and here’s one of the hat Photo Doodles, and I just resized it, you know, so it kind of fits my head, my big head, right?

Now, let’s look at these other ones that I just downloaded, and again, you always ‘Insert – Picture – From File,’ and there’s Santa’s beard. And like any Doodle, it comes in large, so you just have to resize it. You can just have a little bit of fun with that. And, I don’t take myself too seriously, so I have no problems doing this. So, we can do something like that… and what else can we do? We’ll put Rudolph’s nose on me too, how’s that? If my kids could only see me now.

Anyway, so you can see how you can have a little bit of fun with that, and – actually that looks like Santa’s nose that way. And, you could save that as a JPG, you could print it off, put it on a Christmas card, a holiday card, whatever it is that you guys are doing. But, the point is why not have a little bit of fun? We have these CopyDoodles, and now why not have a way of layering them on your own photos? I know there’s a few folks that will be able to use these, and hopefully everyone on this webinar can figure out a way to just have a little bit of fun in using the Photo Doodles.

Now, where can you find those? You go to ‘Special – Photo Overlays,’ and if this works out well, we’re going to add a lot more of these over time. But, you can see some of them there. They’ve already been colored for you, and there’s a snowman’s carrot nose and stuff. So, you can play with that and check those out.

Let’s go back, see what other goodies we have for you… and I’m just going through the latest content so you can see that. Now mind you, everyone should know this already, but you can always change the number of Doodles that display, so I just changed that.

Now these, if you notice, they’re the same Doodles, they’re just not colorized. So let me just click on one of these, this hat here. Now, these are a version where if you click on it – it will – it’s not colorized, but you can just make it colored like a regular Doodle. So, it’s just another way of getting that Doodle and downloading it and such, you can even put it on Facebook if you really desired, there. The other ones are colored and they’re meant to be used a little differently. These are just a regular CopyDoodle. And you can find those under ‘Shape – Holiday,’ you can see them all there.

Actually, there’s a lot more there that we’ve done, so look at all of these new Doodles we have. We have someone who’s doing some work for us, and she just does – matter of fact, I think she’s going a little overboard, they just – they look like works of art here. So, you can see all of the different hand-drawn sketches for Christmas, and Hanukkah, and such. Great for doing any kind of Christmas cards or Christmas marketing, or holiday marketing, so you can go right in there, ‘Shape – Holiday.’

What else do we have for you? We have a ton of Christmas, and Hanukkah, and holiday-type CopyDoodles that are phrases now, so they just kind of add to it. So, you should be familiar with how to use those, that shouldn’t be any too new. Where can you find those? Tish is our designer. You just go to ‘CopyDoodles – Text – Tish’ and you can see all – there’s probably close to 100 of them there. I think there’s about 70 words that she did, and you can see them all there.

Hopefully this will inspire you to do a little bit of holiday-themed marketing, if you hadn’t thought about that.

The other ones, if you’re interested in the PURL ones, they’re up under ‘Becky.’ The PURL ones are kind of unique, I’m not going to get into here, but if you’re a SimplePURLs customer I’m going to be doing another live webinar next week and showing you how to use all of this stuff. But, basically these are Doodles that you would put in an email, or in your direct mail, that kind of references the personalized component to the marketing, if you will. So, you can see some of those there.

And then we just added some Comics this month, a couple of comics. I do want to show them to you, because they’re pretty cool comics, actually. Here’s how you can use them – they’re coffee-spill comics. And my SmartIdeas subscribers got these, because we put a template together for them, but I like to leverage this.

And, they’re just comics of people – this is actually inspired by me spilling coffee on my desk earlier this year, and I created this template out of it. But, the comics are cool because what you guys could do is – let me just download that. I’m going to come back to my Word document here, and I’m going to drop that comic in there. So, you guys should be able to see that.

Now the neat thing about this comic is really it’s designed to be used one really strategic way, which is how I use it, I mean it can always be used another way too, but we left the caption off of it, but basically I like personalizing these with Mail Merge and such, but the idea behind this comic was that you’re sending it to somebody either in email or direct mail.

The idea behind it is because you are surprised, for any number of reasons, you could be surprised because you have not heard from them, it could be surprise because they finally became a customer – just something that shows surprise, or that emotion of excitement, even. “Oh, Mario became a customer of CopyDoodles, and I spilled my coffee when I saw the email come through.” The comic is just meant to reinforce that surprise or excitement over something, and the idea you would use the caption to show that. So, “Mario, I spilled my coffee when I saw you purchased CopyDoodles,” or something like that. I’m doing it in real time, but you get the idea there.

It’s just a comic that I’ve used several different ways over the course of time, and now I’m giving it to you. Actually, I had it on my hard drive and I forgot to upload it into CopyDoodles and wanted to do that, so that’s what those comics are for, and hopefully again, I’m trying to inspire you on this webinar how to use those comics. Where can you get those? You just go to ‘Comics – Access Comics,’ and there they are. We also did a couple of other new ones there that you can look at, and come up with captions.

That is this month’s Power U webinar. I told you they were quick. They’re meant to be about 15-20 minutes, but I want to leave a little bit of time here in case – I do see some people typing stuff in there. Let me come over here to the question box and see if any of them are anything other than making fun of my Santa nose, and if there’s any questions.

Kelly is asking, “Can you use the Overlay CopyDoodles on email?” Yes, Kelly, you can do that. I was in Word. If you wanted to use those Doodles online where you take your photo and add the hats or whatever, you would need some way of layering them, and then I believe even in Word it allows you to save as a JPG. You can see, Kelly, there is the graphic, it’s actually a web graphic. So, the answer is, yes, you can use these on emails or websites, you just need a way of layering the CopyDoodles on top of your photo. So, that could be either something as simple as Word, or Photoshop, or Paint, or some program if you’re a Macintosh there’s other – even PowerPoint could do it, OK? So hopefully that makes sense.

Debra is asking about Punchout Comics – well, that’s good, Debra. Debra’s asking – this is not really on topic, but thank you for taking advantage of this webinar to ask a smart question. She is asking about Punchout Comics. Punchout Comics are very similar almost, Debra, to these overlays.

Let me show you this, because I think this is something that is definitely under-utilized. If you go to ‘Special – Punchout Comics,’ these are comics that have a punchout, where you can add your own graphics. Let me show you how this works, and let me download this one first. I’m just downloading it to my hard drive, and I’m going to bring up Word for a second, Debra. Type in if there’s anything…

Alright, so there’s the comic. Now you can’t tell here, but if I were to colorize the background of this Word document, see how I punched out there, that screen is punched out, it’s actually – it’s a hole, it’s for the monitor. Now, what you’re supposed to do there is grab your own, in this case, screenshot of, say, your website.

Let’s do this, Debra, I’m going to do this in real time for you. And, what I’m going to do is I have a program that I love to use for screenshots, I’ve talked about it before, called SnagIt. So, I just took a screenshot. And, now what I’m going to do, Debra, is I’m going to copy that to my clipboard, and then I’m going to paste it. There is my screen – now, I’m doing this in real time, so it’s probably fraught with potential issues. But, I’m just trying to resize that graphic there. And, you really should not be doing this in Word, I’m doing it in Word only because I don’t want to bring up Photoshop and probably confuse people here. But, let me – because this is really not the program.

Let me bring up Publisher, Publisher is a little bit better for laying stuff out.

Again, you probably really want to use something like a photo editing package. But, let me just start a new one here.

There’s my screen shot that I just took, see how much easier I can maneuver this in Publisher? So there is my screenshot, I just took that in real time. And then here is my comic. What I would do, Debra, is I would bring – I would resize my screenshot, so it kind of fits in there – I’d stretch out, nothing fancy here. And then I would just change the order, so that’s in the back. And there is a Punchout Comic.

You see a comic with – that’s actually kind of cool, where the guy is pointing to himself, like a mirror.

So, does that answer your question? Or were you trying to do anything different?

I’ll to do a couple more real quick, since I have some time here. Another one I like – this is a neat one – the money one. So, download that, and bring up Publisher again. I’m going to delete those, and let’s see here. I’ve got to find a picture…

OK, so you did see what you were missing?

So, I’ll just do this very quickly and I’ll go on to the next question. But, since I’m here, let me just do this one more time. So, there’s a picture of me and now I’m going to drop in that other one that I just downloaded, which was the – I have two screens, so that’s why you’re seeing me kind of doing stuff in the background here. There’s a million dollar bill, and I’m doing this very quickly, but I could literally put my photo in there, and with a little bit of work, have my picture on a million dollar bill type of thing.

That’s the idea behind these Punchout Comics.

Alright. Good. I’m glad you were able to get that fixed, Debra.

Any other questions?

Adrian says she loves the photo Overlay Doodles – thank you very much – and she has some ideas, can she send them to us?

By the way, that’s a good point for everybody, we’re always open to ideas for content. If it makes sense for everybody, we’ll definitely do that and add it to the site. Last month we had, I don’t know if you recall, but last month I don’t remember where we even put them, but last month one of our members – there they are – Becky emailed us and said, “Mike, I need some explosion-type Doodles.” And, I thought, “Hey, that’s a good idea.” So, we created a bunch of – this was back in November, we did a bunch of explosion-type Doodles.

Adrian, absolutely. If you have ideas – here’s where you can send that, you can write this down, if you have any ideas for content, things you would like to see that have a universal appeal for all of our members, just send an email to us and we’ll take a look at that. A lot of times, like I said, all of these explosion Doodles last month came because of one of our members and I thought, “That’s a good idea, we need those in there.”

Matter of fact, believe it or not, these plus signs were from another member this month. She’s like, “Mike, you have no plus signs in there,” so we have a bunch of plus signs in there now. Alright?

I want to thank everybody. And, we’ll see you next month. Take care everybody!

This month I am going focus on CopyDoodles – vector versions, which is probably a topic most people aren’t aware of. But, in order for me to do that I need to take a step backward. So, CopyDoodles Access Club allows both non-designers and designers – so non-designers being 99 percent of our membership, folks that are running businesses that are marketing their businesses and they’re not a graphic design expert, but, allows everybody to create high quality hand-drawn doodles quickly and easily.

Now, before I describe the power of the vector-based CopyDoodles and what they can do for you, I want to take a quick step backwards and give you a quick overview of all the CopyDoodles formats, that way you’re familiar, in case you’re relatively new, you have a good foundation of what exactly the different formats do in the CopyDoodles Access Club.

The CopyDoodles Access Club allows you to generate basically three file formats – actually four file formats. And then as we discussed last month, you can also use them to generate Doodles for your Facebook posts.

This should look familiar here, where it says ‘Free Visit’, that is the download page for CopyDoodles, and you can colorize them. But, you can download CopyDoodles in print format, which are the PNG, the transparent background formats, you can generate JPGs and GIF files, which we typically say are for web and email marketing, and then again what we’re going to talk about primarily today are the vector-based Doodles, which are in EPS format, and I’ll talk about that in a moment.

But again, just for those of you who might not be real familiar with these different formats, PNG is typically the format I personally use probably 95 percent of the time. So, this is a very high-quality format, very realistic looking. It has a transparent background that allows you to layer CopyDoodles for any of your marketing, it could still be for online use, but typically for print marketing. So, we have PNG for print. We also say that you can use JPG format for print, but it’s not the same quality as PNG, there’s some compression. It also has a white background. So, again, this is primarily for use in let’s say in a white page of a website or an email. OK?

So, here’s the difference. And, I don’t know if you can see it on your screen, depending on your resolution, but if you were to look very closely here… and let’s see now if I can bring my pen up… this is the PNG here, and you can see how smooth it is compared to the JPG, again it might not quite show up as well on your computer screen, but trust me, the PNG is definitely a super-high quality format. And you also notice the JPG has a white background. So, if you’re a Photoshop person you can take that out, but there’s really no reason because we give it to you in a transparent format in the PNG. So, I wanted to show that right there.

For web and email we have our JPG and GIF formats, and these are resized, so they’re exactly half the size of the PNG. So the PNG format is very high resolution, and then the software behind the scenes cuts it in half and creates a JPG version, which we just talked about, and then a GIF format. So, some of you might be familiar with GIF format, GIF is different than JPG in that it allows a transparent background also, like the PNG, but it’s also very low quality, it’s the lowest quality of the formats we have. So again, bringing up this, you’ll see the ‘Wow’ is now half the size, you’ll see the JPG has the white background. And again, you may not be able to tell on your screen, but the GIF version, why it’s not bad, is definitely more compressed. The GIF version tends to be very, very small, and again, members use that for websites and email marketing.

Alright?

So that’s the standard formats that probably 99 percent of the members typically are using day in and day out, however, we also allow all of our members to download vector format versions of all CopyDoodles. Now, this is CopyDoodles, not the Comics or anything like that, but every CopyDoodle, and at last count there’s probably 7,000 or 8,000 unique CopyDoodles on this site, they also have vector versions. If you have a design background that would probably interest you because professional designers typically like to use vector-based files when they’re designing.

So the vector format we give you is an EPS file, that stands for an encapsulated postscript file, again most professional designers prefer this format, and I’ll show you why in a moment, but to use this format you have to have the right software tools, and typically you’re using something like Adobe Illustrator to access and edit these files. Now, the versions that we give all of our members, they’re red-only, so they’re red Doodles, but again a professional designer can take that EPS file and colorize it to any color that matches your logo, or whatever you might be doing. So, if you have a professional designer and they say, “Hey listen, I really want to be able to use a vector version when we’re doing something for you…” they can easily do that with the CopyDoodles Access Club.

What’s nice about vector versions, and this is the big thing right here, no pun intended, but the thing with vector versions is they allow a Doodle to be resized without any distortion. So, if you need a 1” CopyDoodle it will look great, and if you need a 10’ CopyDoodle it will look at the same quality. Now, the PNG, the JPG, the GIF versions – I won’t get too technical on you, but they are what is know as a raster format, and while they look great in print for like a sales letter or postcard, if you were to put those on the side of a bus it would start to distort. The vector version does not do that. As a matter of fact, you could have a CopyDoodle as big as a bus, and I’m going to show you one here in a moment that is on the side of a bus. But, that’s the value. The value is you have a vector version Doodle, like we have here on the screen. And no matter how I resize it the quality level stays the same. So, again, you should be able to see that here on the screen.

And we’ve had members create huge CopyDoodles, this is Darren Spindler [assumed spelling], and he had the Kids Bowl Free Bus that toured around the country, and you can see us pointing there. He just used CopyDoodles as an underline there, but that is a CopyDoodle, a vector version there.

Our good friends at Gardener’s [assumed spelling] Mattress and More out here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, they have CopyDoodles. And again, to get the CopyDoodle to look really good, and this is on the side of their delivery truck, they’re using the vector version so that it can be stretched and enlarged to the level that is needed for a large side of a truck like this.

My friend Michael McClain, he has a banner on the outside of his office up in Canada – probably a little hard to see, but he’s using our – this is a huge banner and you can see the green arrows there. And chances are those hours are probably 4’ wide. And again, the vector version allows a high-quality print.

One more example here from my friend Dave Herrington [assumed spelling] and Tom, they did a big banner, again, putting vector-based Doodles on there allows them to be printed at very high quality.

OK?

So, about the CopyDoodles vector version, you want to use it when you need the highest quality, largest Doodle – I probably should add that there – largest Doodle possible. And, if you’re only doing sales letters, postcards, advertising, chances are you may not ever need to use the vector version, but I want everyone to be aware of it, you can view them with Microsoft Word, which I’m going to show you here in a second, if you’re on the Macintosh there’s something called Apple Preview, which allows you to view EPS files, and then Adobe Acrobat.

But, just very quickly – I’m going to bring up Word – and here is Microsoft Word where I’ve embedded a – this is a PNG CopyDoodle, so it’s the transparent background. Now this is the same version, now it’s going to be a little hard here, but if I were to really start distorting this thing, and again, they’re very high-quality the PNG, so I’m probably not going to be able to make it big enough on the screen, but you will see it would start getting a little fuzzy. The vector version, which at first glance looks of a lower quality, the thing about the vector version is as you stretch this thing, no matter how big you make it, it will give you a consistent CopyDoodle. So, I just wanted to kind of show that difference there. I’m just in Microsoft Word, so Microsoft Word will allow you to check out the EPS files, if you need them.

Again, typically what will happen there is you’ll have a designer who’s working with you, and they will say, “Listen, I really prefer to use a vector version.” OK?

And again, you or your designer typically would use Adobe Illustrator to edit, and then they can colorize it, and they can also use Adobe Photoshop to look at them. Then there’s a program called Corel Draw.

So really, again, this is going to be a quick webinar, because it’s not a complex topic, but I wanted everyone to be aware this month of a.) the different file formats we have available for you, when you ought to be using them, and really what the vector version is, because a lot of times people – if I just log in very quickly here, let’s see if I can log
into – there’s my… I’m going to log into CopyDoodles Access Club, which I could have done right there. But, again, if I search on a Doodle, and go to the colorization page here’s all of the different formats, and then there’s the EPS format. I can just click on that and download that.

Alright? So that is – and I’ll open it up for Q&A  here in a moment, but I also just want to show you very quickly, if you haven’t seen it, hopefully you did because you’re on today’s webinar, a couple of things, we just uploaded the November Doodle Digest. So you can check that out. And a ton of new content on this site, a couple of new fonts, and our 3-dimensional Doodles, we’ve just added a bunch of those, it’s a little bit of a different type of Doodle, so you can check those out by clicking on ‘View Latest Content’ on the home page. OK?

So, let’s go back and I’ll answer any questions, and we’ll get this wrapped up. I actually have another one o’clock webinar I’ve got to get ready for. So, I’ve got three webinars today, it’s a webinar Monday. But, let me see if anyone has any questions, you can type it right in the Q&A section of GoToWebinar, and let me make sure that I have that screen up. Alright, I had closed it down. So, any questions? Alright.

Patty is asking, “I’m creating a promotional item, e.g. like a t-shirt. What format do you recommend?” So promotional item, actually Patty, I’ve been wanting to do – I’ll probably do an episode, a Power U webinar, on promotional items, because again CopyDoodles work great on t-shirts, you name it, pens, all of that kind of good stuff. But, here’s what I would recommend, and I’d really recommend this for any type of – anything that you’re doing. I would start with the PNG format, Patty, and see how it turns out. Typically when you’re doing a promotional item you’ll send it to the company that’s designing it, and they’ll tell you if it’s not good enough quality.

Again, we’ve always used PNG for all of the stuff that we’ve done. So, something like a t-shirt, unless the PNG version doesn’t look good, so if it’s a big Doodle – actually, I take that back, because I did see somebody create a sweatshirt and they put CopyDoodles on it, and I thought it looked a little distorted because they probably used a Doodle that was a little too small. So, start with the PNG, see if that works, if it’s something like on the chest, where it’s a smaller logo or something you’re doing, I think a PNG would work fine. If it’s… like this sweatshirt it was the whole front and back, then I would recommend using the vector version. Anything that’s bigger than a sales letter or a postcard you can see where the vector version can benefit.

Alright. Jason is asking, “How do I colorize the VectorDoodles? Why are they only red?” Well, Jason, the reason why is we use a piece of software that allows us to convert the CopyDoodles that we have on the site to the vector version, and by default most of the Doodles are red as we create them. Again, because they’re so targeted for typically a professional design – professional designers know what they want, they know they want to match a certain color. So for them to go into Adobe Illustrator and colorize that is very simple for them, so it just makes life a lot easier, but again, anybody who knows what they’re doing with the Illustrator can colorize them to match logos and any RGB value or CMYK value colors. OK?

Everyone have a great day. And, I’ll see you next month. Take care, everybody.