E-cards With a Difference… A Very MOM-y Christmas 2014

Last year marked my first Christmas as a self-employed freelancer with my own clients… which meant that I approached the whole idea of sending out Christmas cards in very much of an “oh F*@K!” manner: I hastily bought a box of cards, wrote in them in my hilariously horrendous handwriting using a dark green biro (to match my business’ branding) and fired them off to my clients’ postal addresses.

It was a sucky effort.

Even before December 2013 rolled by, I had the idea of doing something different… something special in place of traditional Christmas cards. Now I ain’t no fancy designer, so creating a slick, physical, deliverable item was out of the question. I always liked the idea of doing something that involved an online/digital element though.

This year, I put more thought into it and created Christmas e-cards in the form of custom landing pages on the morganonlinemarketing.co.uk website, which took on two different aspects…

Type 1 – Individual e-cards for clients & other folk

So, as mentioned above, the main aspect of the e-cards took the form of custom landing pages for individual recipients. They’re all orphaned pages (meaning that nothing else is linking to them, internally or externally) and they’ve also been noindexed, meaning that they won’t be picked up by the search engines.

Here’s an example of one. Each one contains a personalised message to the recipient – which beats having a generic message across the board.

So far I’ve created about 20 of them. Beyond clients, they’ve also gone to people who’ve referred me work and who have done me favours or helped me out over the past year. I can also quickly knock one up if someone sends me a card or e-card, so I can potentially avoid that awkward moment that can happen where someone sends you one and you don’t get chance to send one back. Quite handy.

Type 2 – The "welsh ice bauble" challenge…

I also created another e-card page, but this one wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular. It had a secret, ‘Easter egg’ quality to it (and no, I’m not getting my holiday seasons mixed up)…

One of the guys/gals at Welsh ICE (my office/co-working space) came up with the brill idea of giving every member/company a Christmas bauble for the ICE Christmas tree to decorate and customise ourselves. Some people tied it in with their business: e.g. SPORTTAPE wrapped theirs in some of their tape and RecRock covered theirs in branded plectrums.

I wanted to follow suit, so I decided to create a page for it – similar to the above individual/client e-cards – except that this one could be indexed by Google…

For my bauble, I coloured it orangey-gold and drew green lines on it (to try and match the revised logo – the star of the tree) and stuck a label on it with a Google logo and the phrase: "welsh ice bauble"

We're loving @steviephil's ICE bauble. Have a n-ICE Christmas, Steve! From @WIZE_VA #twittertakeover pic.twitter.com/irmXjI3gi9

— ICE (@Welsh_ICE) December 8, 2014

Things got interesting when one person asked “wait, are we meant to Google that?” And as I type this (and I pray to [God / whichever higher being will listen to me] that it stays put), it’s ranking #1 on page 1 of Google for… "welsh ice bauble"!

Of course, in typical Sod’s Law fashion, when a few people tried it at first, it didn’t appear at all (even though it was #1 on my computer, with personalised search disabled). But sure enough, a few days later, it hit the top spot, where (fingers-crossed!) it’ll hopefully stay put – at least for this Christmas.

It’s a bit long-winded I guess, but a few people have commented that they thought it was a cool idea.

The creation process

Now that I’ve explained my two approaches with the e-cards, I wanted to talk about how I created them.

I’m quite chuffed with the tree image. I found the squiggle image online via a stock image site, but it had quite a complicated copyright/usage issue related to it, so I did the cheeky thing and hired an illustrator on Fiverr to draw something similar. Total cost: $5.

Then I planned to simply stick the ‘orb’ part of the MOM logo above the squiggly tree, to act as the star – but it looked naff. I grabbed a couple of passing-by graphic designers at the co-working space for their advice (kudos to Jonathan of Rubber Band Design and Huw of RenderCube Design Solutions) and one of them very kindly offered to tweak it for me: giving the orb a solid black outline, adding a orangey glow to the edges of the orb, giving the tree a gradient (black at the bottom, green at the top) and adding the “MERRY CHRISTMAS” text at the bottom.

And thanks to a bit of work that I did on a client’s event mini-site recently, I discovered a handy WordPress plugin called Post Duplicator, which allows you to create lots of similar pages really quickly and easily. Once I created the first e-card, I could duplicate it and then all I’d need to do is change the URL, the name and the personalised message. Job done!

As for the Welsh ICE Bauble page, which is indexable by search engines yet orphaned, I used Google Webmaster Tool’s Fetch As Google tool to point Google in its direction. It took a few days as well as a wobbly period of sometimes-it-shows-and-sometimes-it-doesn’t, but we got there in the end.

The only thing I’ll say, which has been a proper ‘you live, you learn’ moment: with the individual e-cards, every page was named “Merry Christmas!”, and although the URLs were different, the URLs do not show up when you look at your list of Pages in WordPress – only the name of the page…

Next year I think I’ll make sure to include the name of the recipient (e.g. “Merry Christmas, Gareth!”) – would make things a tad easier, heh…

So there’s the proof that you don’t have to be a designer or a big swanky agency to send quality Christmas e-cards to your clients – and it doesn’t have to cost the earth or take a ton of time either.

What have you done for Christmas this year? Anything special? Let me know in the comments!