Multi-lingual support added to Send Out Cards

SendOutCards has launched itself into the non-English market with their new “multi-lingual” font capability.  You can now write your content in Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese!

You may be wondering what had prevented you from writing your content in these languages before.  The answer is that until now, Send Out Cards hasn’t supported accented characters such as é or ê.

This is a feature that I’ve wanted for quite a while so I’m very excited about this!  I send a lot of birthday and Christmas cards and have been unable to correctly spell Happy Birthday (Bonne fête) or Merry Christmas (Joyeux Noël) in cards to my French speaking contacts.

You’ll find a great variety of blank cards (many without words in English on the covers) in the Special Collections section of the card catalog. The programming department built in a soft keyboard supporting Latin character fonts (non-Asian fonts). To use the new keyboard, go to the card catalog and click on the card you want to use. When you open the card, the menu will show the soft keyboard, which you can use to insert special characters in your chosen language.

Send Out Cards has tutorials on all SOC subjects in English and Spanish.  (click on FAQ and then on Tutorials & Media).

A few of the standard fonts were replaced so that every font in the system would be fully functional with this new feature. Make sure you check out the new fonts: Amore, Cursive Pen, Paintbrush and Rascal!

If you aren’t already a Send Out Cards customer and would like to try this out then head over here to send a card on me.

Comic example

After my last post on Comic Life, someone asked for an example of something I’ve done.

We took my son and one of his friends to a movie recently. At the theatre, we took a bunch of pictures of the boys acting out various movies in front of the respective posters. Then using Comic Life, I turned a bunch of these pictures into a comic with the boys saying things appropriate to each of the movies. We then uploaded this to Send Out Cards and sent out a card to the friend’s parents.

Really quick and easy to create a fun card this way.

How I send cards

When I send a card, I use a service called Send Out Cards.  I originally got interested in this service just to market my existing businesses and I was so impressed that I decided to become a distributor for them.

Why do I use Send Out Cards?

• It’s cheaper than buying a card from the store. I pay about a dollar a card plus postage and I’m hard pressed to find a decent card in the store for less than three dollars.
• It’s faster as I can do everything from my computer, wherever I happen to be.
• It’s less work – I don’t have to print the card, stuff the envelope, find a stamp or drop it in the mail. Send Out Cards does all that for me.
• The cards are written in my own handwriting, using my own signature which makes them really personal
• It’s really to make a custom card using my own photos or to include my own photos on the inside.  The vast majority of the cards I do are created from photos that I’ve taken.
• For those times that I don’t choose to make a custom card, they have a selection of over 12,000 stock cards – a much larger selection than I’d find at the store.

When do I send a personal greeting card? I send all my Christmas cards this way as well as birthday and anniversary cards. Send Out Cards tracks birthdays and anniversaries and reminds me when it’s time to send one of those.

Yesterday was mothers day.  Did I use Send Out Cards to send mothers day cards to my mother and to my wife?  Absolutely, I did.  Highly personalized cards with photos and written in my own handwriting.

When do I send business greeting cards? Following up after meeting people at networking events. Prospecting cards to attract new business.

The video clip here is from “America’s Best Product”, a show that profiles great companies.

Did I mention that you can also send gifts with the greeting cards? Things like chocolates or cookies or even books. I don’t send these nearly as often as I send cards but whenever I have, I’ve had a tremendous response from the recipient.

I have a weakness for the white chocolate cookies in particular – they’re absolutely delicious.

So that’s how I send cards.  How do you?

Comic book style cards

I see that Plasq has released Comic Life Magiq which is their follow on to Comic Life.

How is this relevant to greeting cards?  I’ve used Comic Life to create some really neat images for the front of a card.  I’ve done cards that are comic strips on the front with something else on the inside and they work really well.

For example, I sent a card to my wife last valentines day that had a story in it.  The story was all told in comic book format and was done with Comic Life.  The final product was really nice and it was amazingly simple to create the comic using their product.