AskPat 297 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 297 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business related questions five days a week.

All right, now let's head on over and check out Mike's question today.

Mike: Hey, Pat. My name is Mike from Raleigh, North Carolina and I'm spending some time on your blog and I noticed that at the top of every blog post that you do, you use a really high quality image and it looks like these images had a lot of time and effort put into them. They're highly customized, and I'm wondering how you go about doing that. I also noticed that they have sharing functions, like sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, and that's not something that you normally get on top of an image. I'm wondering how you do that, where you get your images, and whether you outsource them or there's a certain software that you use.

I was also really, really, impressed with Hayden's blog over at No Hat Digital. I don't know how well you know Hayden, but I'm also wondering how he creates his because his are absolutely top notch. If you could give me a little bit of insight on this, I'd really, really appreciate it. It's been on my to-do list for about a month. I've searched your blog, and I couldn't find anything that showed how you actually go about doing that. So I appreciate it, Pat, and like always, keep up the great work.

Pat Flynn: Mike, thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it, and there's a few questions I want to answer here, the first one being where do I get these high quality images? Well, the images that you see on Smart Passive Income, both on blog posts and of course in every podcast episode, they are taken from different stock photography websites, and then I take them into Photoshop or my assistant takes them into Photoshop. I don't do the podcast episodes anymore, but I still do the blog post ones actually, and what happens is then we put text over it, we kind of just make sure everything is in its place, we put the logo from Smart Passive Income on it, and boom. It's done. Then, I can put it there on the post. It's quite a bit of work, but I did Photoshop for five years before I became an internet marketer and in this space, so I kind of knew the software really well. My assistant, he's a designer, so that's just what he does for a living. But you don't need to be a Photoshop wizard or a design expert in order to do those.

There's some really cool tools out there you can use to take any photo and then put words and other things, logos, and other pictures on them. The best one out there is Canva.com. C-A-N-V-A dot com. It's definitely the best one to use and easiest to use, and they even have their own set of stock photography you can pull from their own website that you can even purchase on there as well for a reasonable price, depending on the one that you select. So you can pick the stock photography you want to use, or you can even upload your own and then use their software which is all web-based, a web-based application, to add text and numbers and logos and anything you want on it. Just export it and then it's yours and you can do what you want with it like put it in your blog posts, like Hayden does at No Hat Digital or like I do on Smart Passive Income, and there you go. Now, there are a number of different places to get stock photos as well, and I do want to mention a resource, though, that I recently stumbled upon, actually helped to contribute to create, and these are for the guys over at fizzle.co. If you go to AskPat.com/fizzle-images, again askpat.com/fizzle-images, or you can get the links in the show notes at AskPat.com under Episode 297.

It'll take you to this really awesome resource that they just created. It's called 50+ sites for free images, fonts, and icons for your blog. So these are free resources, which I don't use actually. I use iStockphoto.com, which is very expensive now and I don't use that quite as much as I used to because they've raised the prices, but I also use DepositPhotos.com. And again, on those two sites, I pay to get stock photography, and then I put them into Photoshop and then add text on them. You can even put them into Canva if you want and add text on top of those to put on your blog or website as well. But this resource, AskPat.com/fizzle-images is going to be a great one for you. It's super, super helpful so you should check it out. That'll give you some information on where you can get some images, just like the ones you see on my site and Hayden's site, and other people's sites who are using great quality images.

It's important to use quality images. I mean, obviously it stood out to you, Mike and for everybody listening. Some of you might be just kind of saying, “Oh, you know, the text is okay. I'm not really into the images right now.” What's the first thing you see on Facebook when you're scrolling through your newsfeed? It's images, right? Or videos now, too. Or when you're flipping through Twitter, you see those images and that's the thing that pops out at you, so images are really, really important. I will say that on Facebook at least, they do have a higher view rate, so in Facebook's algorithm, they do get pushed out more into the newsfeed at a higher click through rate, and so I track all that stuff and it absolutely works. So it's important to get these images done. Again, DepositPhotos.com, iStockPhoto.com are resources you can use to gather high quality stock images, but also Canva.com is a tool you can use to sort of customize them a little bit.

Now in a perfect world, and this is something I always like to think about, okay if I had a magic wand and I could just do it the way I wanted to and it would be all done for me, what would be the best scenario? And it would be using my own photography. Because when you use stock photography, you're using stock photography, stuff that other people can buy and may have seen elsewhere.

With stock photography, you gotta be careful. You don't want to use the ones that everybody has used before. Michael Hyatt even talked about this in a recent episode of his on This Is Your Life, which is his podcast, how you've got to be careful when you're choosing the right photos because if you use the ones that everybody's seen before, they're just going to not really work as well for you, like the one that shows a little drop of water and then the ripples out of it, or the one of the … What is it … I think it's the apple that's cut into it, but then on the inside, it's an orange. I've seen that everywhere now, or the one with the goldfish jumping into another bowl. You've probably heard of some of those, or seen some of those before, so just use ones that relate to your content, but also try not to use the most popular ones either when you go to these sites to check out this custom work. Then when you add your text on top of them, both Hayden and I like to use two text, two different formats, sometimes three.

You'll see on mine, at least on smartpassiveincome.com, the images have sort of a bolder, straight edged kind of text super imposed with a cursive type text. For those of you who are just curious because I get this question all the time, “What are those fonts?” The sort of bolded one is Proxima Nova, and that's Extra Bold is what I usually use, but you have to actually purchase that one. That one doesn't come free, and the other one which I believe is free, which you can find out elsewhere, it's a cursive handwritten one and that's Pacifico. Now, remember what I just said about not doing what other people are doing, so hopefully not everybody's going to use that, but I have seen people do it. I like the juxtaposition of the hard edged, straight edged boxy font and using some words that are like “and” and “too” and “the” in a cursive type of writing. That typically works and looks pretty well.

It's going to take a little bit of time, even on Canva, to get used to the not only the tool but what looks good, what doesn't, and as far as the layout, I like when there's something on either the left third or the right third that really captures what that post or podcast episode is about, and then on the other side, that's where I put the text. So if something is in the center in an image, I typically will not use that image because I want it to be either on the left third or the right third so I can have some room for the text, but also make and feature whatever it is that's on that image and make it look nice.

So hopefully that answers your question. Thank you so much, Mike. I appreciate it, and an AskPat t-shirt is going to be headed your way. You'll hear from my assistant in the next week or two to collect your information, and for those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is head on over to AskPat.com, and you can ask right there on that page thanks to the widget from Speakpipe.

Thank you so much, I appreciate it, and here's a quote from Peter F. Drucker to finish off the show. He says, “Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.” So good. Every successful business, somebody has made a courageous decision at some point in the journey. Have you made a courageous decision yet? Do it. Awesome, thank you so much. Thanks again for your votes at podcastawards.com. Look for Smart Passive Income in the business category. Again, PodcastAwards.com, voting daily through March 24th. Thank you again so much for your support. I appreciate it, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Cheers.