Month: May 2011

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Using QR Codes

Now that you know a little bit more about QR Codes or Quick Response Codes how can you use them? Wow, that is the exciting part and some of it is based only on your imagination. Here are a few of my suggestions.

Add a QR Code to Your Print Brochures
Add a QR Code to your print brochure, you can send your user to your home page or better yet send them to a custom created landing page that has a special offer to allow you to actually measure the results of your exposure from a trade show, speaking engagement, direct mailing.

Offer Special Coupon Codes and Promotions
Want to track mobile Web users? As most desktop users are not using QR Code scanners, you can encode special offers as a text snippet and even embed a special coupon code in a QR Code that can then be used immediately by smartphone users.

Encourage Google HotPot, FourSquare, and Google Places Reviews
By embedding your QR Code on your menu or guest check, restaurants can encourage visitors to interact immediately with location specific places to share their favorite spots with others and encourage visitors to even leave service reviews.

Print a QR Code on the back of your business card
With the ability to embed a vCard in your QR Code, you can make it easy for smartphone users to add your contact information to their phone and if they are syncing to Outlook will appear there too.

How do you think you will use a QR Code? Just click comments and let me know your suggestion too.

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Free QR Code Generators

You don’t need to have a smartphone to create a QR Code for your print or website use. You can use one of these free online resources.

Kaywa
This free generator will create a QR Code using their URL to host the QR Code image for a phone number, a text snippet, an SMS text message, or a URL. Once the smartphone has read the QR Code the application will allow the user to save it, put it into contacts, email it or text message it, depending on the type of QR Code you have generated.

Kerem Erkan
This QR Code Generator is more advanced allowing more options. With 21 options to select from you can create a QR Code that will send a meCard, bookmark a website, tweet on Twitter, do an Android Marketplace app search, create a vCalendar event, and create a FourSquare new vendor URL. The list is extensive and you may want to make several variations. This QR Code generator will even allow you to choose the colors for your graphic. It also allows you to save the image in a variety of formats so you can host it on your own website.

Personally I like the options available with the second choice as well as the option to host the image generated on my own site so that I am not at the mercy of someone else if their site goes down.

So what can you do with a QR Code?
Actually that will be our Friday blog post so make sure to check back. We’re going to write about how you might use a QR Code and why you should consider implementing them on your website and printed materials.

For more great information about QR Codes, how to use them, how they got started we recommend that you visit this excellent article at the Social Media Examiner.

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QR Codes Explained

QR Code to our Website
QR Code to our Website

You’ve seen them before, the funny square images on print pages and in magazines; they’re called QR Codes or Quick Response Codes. Scan the one to the right and it will take your mobile smartphone to our website’s home page.

QR Codes are not new, but they are gaining importance with more users accessing the Web with 3G and 4G technology on their smartphones. Similar to a bar code used by retailers to scan at checkout, QR Codes however are two dimensional graphics that can hold thousands of characters of information. This makes them the perfect way to direct users to online content quickly.

If you’ve seen funny colored graphics that look like Indian Blankets, these are Microsoft’s proprietary versions of QR Codes and are called MS Tags. They however need a special Microsoft reader to decode and in today’s mobile world may have limited use.

There are plenty of free QR code scanners, generators, and readers. I have one for my Droid phone called QR Droid that works great. With any mobile QR app, you take a picture of the QR code and the app then lets you select the appropriate action based on the information embedded in the QR Code. Scan ours with your phone and you’ll go our website home page.

In the next few days I’ll be writing about how you can use QR codes for SEO and for integrating your website onto the mobile Web.

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Solving a Blog Hack Problem

Even the very best website and most vigilant webmaster can have their blog hacked. It just happens. Typically the higher you are in the organic search results the more attempts will be made to hack your blog.

Why does someone want to hack your site?

It is typically for these reasons:

  1. Parlay on your high placement and traffic to bleed off your search engine capital to a black hat optimizers list of sites that need “SEO Juice”.
  2. Parlay on your website placement and traffic to spew malware to your site visitors to turn visitors’ computers into spam bots.
  3. Use your unprotected site as a launch pad for black hat optimization doorway pages.

There is simply nothing personal about the situation, it is simply a crime of convenience. If you are not secure, you are a target. In some cases the security problem may be on your web host’s side, but in other cases the issue is on your website’s side.

I have successfully used several WordPress plug-ins on a number of client sites to lock out the bad guys, even ones who some how seem to keep getting in. Here are three of the plug-ins that I really like to use that help to beef up your security after you have thoroughly cleaned your blog and website from a hack attack.

WP File Monitor Plus
If you are repeatedly being hacked with this plug-in, you will instantly know which core files need to be replaced. The application can email or send you a text message.

Login Lockdown
Limit attempted intrusions by locking out bots and spiders who are testing your admin and trying to crack your password. You choose what settings to lock them out with. Your MySQL database will keep a list of attempts and lockouts so you can see the date of intrusion attempts.

WP Admin Renamer Extended
I love this one. First create a new admin file with a super secure name and password. Then rename your existing admin using this plug-in. But don’t stop there. Go back in and set your old admin user as a subscriber only; effectively locking out the bad guys that even if they can get back in they can’t make any changes.

These are great starts, but be aware that if a hacker really, really wants to get in they can be extremely difficult to keep out. My motto is make it very hard for them to get in and time consuming that they simply want to move elsewhere to do their dirty work.