Hey, We're taking a break from Facebook Ads this week because I had one of those memories pop up in my feed which got me thinking – the anniversary of the very first short story I published. Well, the first I self-published, which is when it feels like my career really began. It was a wild time, 2011 – felt a little like a gold rush. Everyone scrambling to get stories out to ravenous readers while publishers were hunkering down, waiting for the internet fad to peak. (lulz) I was younger then, says Captain Obvious, with plenty of pre-pandemic energy to learn the million new things you need to know when you become your own publisher (all while trying to put those pesky words in the right order…). Things have only become more complicated in the eleven years since, as you will all know very well indeed. Which makes it the perfect time for me to say, "You absolutely must invest time in learning this completely new skill." So, errr, brace yourselves. You absolutely must invest time in learning this completely new skill. While it feels like we are staking out virgin territory, everyone brings something useful to the self-publishing party. A legal background, business acumen, marketing experience, social media chops, media training, instinctive understanding of reader psychology, preternatural understanding of storytelling structure, or just plain 'ol gumption. But the skill I was most jealous of – which I didn't have when starting out, and only began working on a few years ago – was graphic design. I'm not an artist in that sense. If you ask me to draw a straight line, I'll probably end up breaking the pencil. I have no eye for matching colors. I can't really visualize things very well in the way that a real artist or designer can. Art was a subject I struggled with in school – it always felt like some otherworldly magic which my brain simply couldn't compute. So, I relied on professionals. I outsourced all my graphic design to people with, you know, qualifications and experience. All of them were great to work with but even if you have plenty of budget to spare, there's always little bits that pop up which you need… yesterday. A new graphic for your site, a header for your newsletter, a nice image for social media, a compelling background for your ad. This limitation of mine was especially frustrating when learning something like Facebook Ads or BookBub Ads, where I would often need to test different variations of background images, change the color on a button, switch one font out for another, try a different tagline – all the things that you sometimes need to do to make an ad successful. Especially when learning the platform and discovering what your target readers respond to best. It's almost impossible to predict what you will need in advance. Then someone told me about Canva – some magic, new, free, online, easy-to-use graphic design software which deployed all sorts of clever doodads so that even someone like me could turn out half-decent graphics. Reader, I was skeptical – especially after seeing how terrible my first designs were. But then I spent a few hours every week practicing, trying to make things look a little more pro all the time. Watching a few videos on YouTube for tips. That kind of thing. Within a few months I was turning out pro-looking graphics, neat headers for my emails, branded graphics for my website. It was a gamechanger. It's difficult to explain exactly how liberating it felt to add this new skill. I didn't realize just how many things I was auto-rejecting because I didn't know how to throw a quick graphic together. It's no exaggeration (I think?) to say it felt like the world opening up to me in a marketing sense. These days, I'm using Canva Pro and I'm more than happy to pay the $100-ish a year the fancier version costs, because I use it so much. But, honestly, most people will only need the free version. (I keep meaning to do a video or email comparing the two versions – but you will get some of that from my previous videos on how to make ads with Canva, which you can find on my YouTube channel.) Canva gets better every year - free and premium versions - and the team are always adding cool new features like the Background Remover. There are still quite a few things it doesn't do – but there are (free!) tools available for those jobs also. I collected my favorite ones in this blog post a while back.
You'll find all sorts of handy wotsits which I use regularly, like a HTML color picker – for knowing exactly what shade of blue that is – or a color matching wheel, which saves my bacon all the time. There's also a handy widget for shrinking your images. For example, I was able to get the above blog post image down to 32kb without sacrificing much quality. (This is super handy for keeping the HTML weight of your emails low, and maximizing deliverability BTW.) Anyway. One thing Canva Pro has which the free version doesn't is access to a free library of stock photos – around 100m or so, at the last count. It's one of many nifty features you get when you upgrade, along with a considerably bigger selection of fonts, a magic resizer, and that aforementioned background remover (easily the most used Premium features – by me, at least). I had someone emailing to ask if it's better to upgrade to Canva Pro, or jump on the $39 DepositPhoto deal at AppSumo – which I shared with you earlier this week. (As I said then: that's an affiliate link, but this is most certainly a superb deal which will save you a lot of money – one which I avail of myself!) I'll give you my straight take: it depends. If you are a heavy Canva user, and you currently use lots of other tools to do the things that (free) Canva doesn't (like resizing your designs for different formats, removing backgrounds, etc.), then I'd recommend trying the 30-day free trial of Canva Pro to see if it makes your life easier enough to justify the expense. But if you are mostly interested in upgrading to Canva Pro to get access to the free stock library, I'd suggest grabbing that DepositPhotos deal instead – and maybe stacking codes if you are a heavy user. You get 100 stock photos for $39, they never expire, and you can stack the deal as much as you like… while AppSumo still has codes left. Why is that better than the Canva library – which you can use as much as you like, once you upgrade to Pro? Well, three key reasons:
Those things will either matter to you personally, or not. Either way, I think the DepositPhotos deal is a good one if you have any use for stock photos at all. It's also the lowest-ever price for 100 stock photo credits – a saving of several hundred dollars off sticker price at DepositPhotos itself. Yeah, there are free sites out there – and if you are richer in time than money, you can explore that route. But aside from quite a bit of needle-in-haystack hunting, you will also have to be careful around the legalities, and make absolutely sure that you have the rights to use that picture – otherwise you could get a payment demand from an expensively suited lawyer, as has happened to some self-publishers before, even for something like a blog post image they thought was free to use. When you get stock from DepositPhotos (or Canva), you have permission to use the images for commercial use – both online and in print – and you don't have to worry about nastygrams. Really, the only bad thing about this deal is that AppSumo only runs it once or twice a year, and only has a limited amount of deal codes each time – meaning that people inevitably get disappointed. And this time the deal is more compelling than ever because 10% of the proceeds are being donated to two Ukrainian non-profits helping with relief efforts there (reflecting DepositPhoto's Ukrainian heritage). Get 100 DepositPhoto credits at AppSumo before they run out. One important thing to note: you must activate your deal within 60 days of purchase – then your credits are active (and will never expire). Reason for that is that's the return-guarantee period. So if you avail of the deal and change your mind, you can get a refund, no questions asked. Anyway, I'll have plenty more videos and guides soon, not just on Facebook Ads, but more on Canva too and various ways you can use stock photos to make your branding and business a little more pro. If you missed my video tutorial on Facebook Ads earlier this week, you can find that here:
Have a great weekend, Dave P.S. This week I'm nodding along to Temple of the Dog with Hunger Strike. |
Friday, April 29, 2022
The one skill I really wish I had 🎨
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