Strange Duck - Tech Talk in Plain English

Ok, this is not quite a tech related post, but you can consider this your non-tech mechanical tip. You can donate your old car to charity - do good, feel good about getting that stinky clunker off the road, and receive a tax receipt to boot - without exerting much energy at all.

My old beater died and since I had no idea how to get rid of it, I asked some friends, one of which told me about the programs that allow you to donate your car to a charity of your choice. They come and pick it up, tow it free, take it apart and sell the good bits, give the proceeds to your charity, and dispose the rest properly. Some even super nicely - in an eco friendly green manner.

A quick Google turned up a few options for us Canadians on where to donate our cars. As usual Americans get a bit more choice.

Donate your car to charity

Charity Cars

Car heaven

Here are a few other reasons to pat yourself on the back:

You will be making an invaluable contribution to the less fortunate in your community.

They handle the forms for you, saving you time and trouble.

Most believe in eco-friendly recycling, making sure all standards of vehicle disposal are reached and kept. That means hundreds of tonnes of beaters are recycled annually. The balance of your beater is reduced in volume by 90% - and that saves a lot of landfill space.

Getting a beater off the road is good for the air. That’s the stuff we breathe, and here in Toronto, it gets so bad that we are told to keep our children inside so the cars can go out and play. Older than 1995 vehicles emit 20 times more hydrocarbon emissions than a 2001 vehicle, and 65 times more than a 2007 vehicle. That’s too much.

I am donating because it is simple, convenient and nice. I save time, and I do good.

Here’s my first quick post for the How to Market Cheaply and Effectively Using the Internet For Starving Artists and Other Small Businesses. It’s a quickie, and comes from an email I had with Alison Humphrey, who is working at Sarrazin Couture film production as well as at Stratford Shakespeare Festival (a multi-talented artsy gal!)

Here is my big time and money saver for companies in industries with notoriously small marketing budgets: use Wordpress blog software to build your web site.

You will get more bang for your buck.

Here are 2 sites I put up for tv/film production companies using Wordpress. These are using free Wordpress themes to dress up their site a bit.

• Streely Maid Films producers of Diamonds in a Bucket
• PWK productions producers of Puppets Who Kill

Wordpress themes, or templates, are kind of like “skins.” It’s the same Wordpress engine underneath, but the theme can make the site look quite different. It’s kind of like dressing up Barbie.

There are also fancier Wordpress themes called Premium Themes. These make Wordpress sites look more like a magazine site. For these sites below, we used the wonderful Wordpress Wordpress Revolution Magazine theme by Brian Gardner

• Author Paul Quarrington
• Moving Stories Film Festival. Watch for the June 15th big announcement at BookExpo.

You can also do an all out customized original Wordpress with your own design.

Production costs gets more expensive as you go from top to bottom of the above list, but looking at the Canadian TV scene, I think the top ones are fine. There’s little point spending thousands of dollars on a site if no one comes to it - or worse - when they get there, it really wasn’t worth the effort.

So - build your site using Wordpress, then take that extra money and build a Wordpress site for each of your film productions. Audiences are starting to expect this.

By using Wordpress for each film’s site, you can start your site early and build hype and Google authority. You can cross promote the site’s existence during your promotion and publicity, and then invite fans to come to the site, interact and leave comments. You build fans. You can also grab their emails so you can send them news about the show, or other upcoming shows.

With the money you saved building your web site, you can now put more money into other marketing initiatives - like building really cool EPKs or electronic press kits. These will have all the necessary things up on your site ready for press and journalists to download. The easier it is for them to gather their information, the more likely it is that they will write or talk about you.

The more I do this for clients (and myself) the more I think this is smart.

Wordpress is still becoming hotter and hotter. With a monstrously huge fan base that keeps developing for it, it’s become a huge Lego for web sites, allowing you to add really cool functions and plugins - like send to a friend, or forums, or notify me.

I can go on and on - but this is enough to get you thinking. I will write more about Wordpress in other posts

I love lurve Wordpress.

Quick apologies for not writing for a while. I have been really busy - yes the standard excuse - and though I have started about 20 posts all pretty much geared to helping small production companies, authors, theatre companies or businesses on how to market cheaply and effectively using the Internet, I haven’t finished any of them. I just haven’t had the time to complete them accordingly.

Consequently, I find myself saying or writing the same things over and over to clients in emails or telephone calls. Surely, there’s got to be a more effective way to get that information out?

Then poof - the answer came to me. Yes - I will blog it!

So, what I will try to do is keep that perfectionist streak at bay and just write quickly - preferably after I write an email to a client - and just use some fancy copy and paste work, and pop the info from email into a post.

That way it will all be here on the site and I can refer you to the right page and have fancy links or pics ready for you so that you can check things out quickly and see what I am referring to.

Perfect. We’ll see how it goes.

Here are a few things I have been busy with:

• Author Paul Quarrington’s web site
• Moving Stories Film Fest site
• Getting my second degree black belt in tae kwon do
• Directing and editing the cutest series of interviews for the Writer’s Union called Elevator Pitch - a Bookshorts production of course

And now big news. I am moving to Newfoundland!!! Yes - I am running away to fulfill a lifelong dream of being an artist, and have found the most wonderful community of filmmakers, people, and spirit right here in Canada on the Rock. St. John’s is like Paris in the 20s. Well, almost. Kind of. Pretty much.

No worries. I will be back-and-forthing a lot between St. John’s and Toronto (feeling guilty about the carbon footprint all ready) and we’ll always have the Internet! I love the Internet.

Have any questions you need answered? Email me irene @ strangeduck.com

I need to learn to use Skype with video. Anyone know a good tutorial?