AP 0276: How Can I Improve the Graphics on My Website?

AskPat 276 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here and this is Episode 276 of AskPat. I appreciate you joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have an awesome question today from Singleton. Before we get to that, I do want to thank today's awesome sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com, the super easy to use cloud accounting solution to help you with all of your small business finances. Over five million small businesses are using FreshBooks and you should too because it's going to totally help you save time, save you from feeling that stress when it comes to your finances, and of course we all know tax season is coming. This is going to help you like none other.

So many people have already told me that this is one of the be resources I've ever shared and I'm just very happy to have FreshBooks on as a sponsor and helping to pay for things like my assistant to put this together and all that other cool stuff, server and hosting. Thank you for letting me share FreshBooks and I know it can help you. Go ahead and go to FreshBooks.com and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us” section and that'll give a thirty-day trial. You can try it out, thirty days. Go to FreshBooks.com and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us” section. Sweet. Now, let's get today's question from Singleton.

Singleton: Hi, Pat. This is Singleton from Baltimore, Maryland. Thank you so much for doing what you do and providing so much great value every single day. My question is—I have a blog that I use to attract attention my MLM businesses to get customers and possible prospects to join my business. I use graphics a lot, but I am not a graphic design artist. I no longer really want to pay for other graphic design artist to build graphics because I don't think they understand my vision. My question is, what resources—software, websites—can I use to build great graphics and attract more business and more looks at my blog? Thank you so much.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Singleton, thank you so much for the question today. I really appreciate this because I was very fortunate to have come from an architecture background myself where I was five, six days a week sometimes spending most of my time on Photoshop to do some stuff related to architecture. I got very used to the software and then when I got laid off in '08 and started my own business, graphics were never a huge issue for me. I could always figure things out in Photoshop. Now, I will say that Photoshop is a fantastic resource, but it has a lot more tools than is necessary to run your business and to provide graphics and banners and everything you need to attract attention and do all the things you want to do with graphics.

You definitely don't need Photoshop. Although, if you want to take a stab at it, you can maybe take a course on Lynda.com or get a tutorial going on YouTube or even pay for some tutorials yourself. Like I said, I don't even use more than ten percent of what Photoshop is used for for my business. What I would recommend are these three different pieces of software and what's really cool is they are very, very economical and they're not going to cost you a ton of money. There's obviously some stock photos that you might have to pay for if you wanted to overlay graphics on top of those and those things will cost money, of course, and those … I have a couple of resources for stock photography where if you go SmartPassiveIncome.com and you look at my podcast, every podcast has a different image.

Those come from these resources and that does a great job of helping differentiate each episode from each other, but also drawing attention on social media and also on the webpage for what I want to draw attention to. Those resources for stock photos . . . I use istockphoto.com and I also use DepositPhotos.com. Those are both, I think, the top two that I use. Excuse me. You can also use Flickr.com, however there's a lot of rules and you have to look up creative commons and understand what the rules are for manipulation and use and making sure people are credited for their works on your site and things like that. Make sure to brush up on that and we have some resources on smartpassiveincome.com on when to use those certain images and when to not use them or when not to manipulate them.

Actually, I created a direct link to that article for you just now. If you go to AskPat.com/images2, again that's AskPat.com/images2, that'll take you to my post called “The Ultimate Guide to Finding and Using Images on Your Blog.” That'll be really helpful. In terms of editing and creating your own images and things like that, there's a lot of different things you could do. You could use your own camera, if you have an iPhone or an Android phone that's really helpful, and then you can do some things like overlay text on them or you can use iStockPhoto or DepositPhotos and overlay text on those. It kind of depends on what kind of photos you want to use, but I'm going to give you three resources for photo manipulation for image creation and graphic design that are going to help you, especially when it comes to posting images on your blog posts and on social media.

The first one, and this is the one that most people are using these days, is called Canva. You can go to Canva.com, that's Canva.com. I've used that several times for those quote cards that you might see on my social media stream, sometimes on Instagram, but mostly on Twitter. Those have been really helpful and Canva is just such a great intuitive tool and it would be my top recommended choice and again it's fairly, fairly cheap. I mean, we're talking a dollar or two per image, if that, sometimes free. Then we have PicMonkey.com. This is similar to Canva, but it might fit your style better, PicMonkey.com, so PicMonkey.com. The other one, Singleton, is GetPaint.net.

Now, I will say Paint, which you can find at GetPaint.net, is the most like Photoshop. If you have any experience with Photoshop, that might be a great one and it's free, which is really cool. The other two, you're going to have to pay a little bit, but it's just much more intuitive and it only has the tools that you really need to do what it is you need to do for your websites and social media. Hopefully, that helps out. Let me list those resources for all of you one more time. We have iStockPhoto.com and DepositPhotos.com. We also have AskPat.com/images2 to link you to my “Ultimate Guide to Finding and Using Images on Your Site” and then we have Canva.com, which is my top recommended. That's Canva.com. Then, we have PicMonkey.com and finally GetPaint.net.

Singleton, I hope that answers your question and gives you some tools or at least starting points to help you with your graphics and stuff. I can't wait to see what you come up with. An AskPat t-shirt is going to be headed your way for having your question featured here in the show, so, Singleton, look out for an email from my assistant within the next couple weeks to collect your information and we can send that off to you. For those of you listening, if you have question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is go to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page. Again, I want to thank the guys over at SpeakPipe.com for providing that widget to make it really easy for me to collect all your guys' voice mails and post them here on the podcast so we can follow up and provide value to as many people as we can.

Thank you so much. This show wouldn't happen without you guys. It literally would not happen because there would be no answer … There'd be no questions to answer. Anyway, thanks so much. I also want to thank FreshBooks.com, which is not only a cool web app to help you keep track of your finances, but they also have an award-winning mobile app to go along with it so you can check on the go. What's really cool is if you do any invoicing for your business, they have that built in as well and it makes it super professional-looking and easy to bill your clients or your students or those companies that you're consulting for and get paid. You can get more of what you need to do to grow and build your business. Check it out. Go to FreshBooks.com and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us” section.

All right. Thank you for checking out AskPat again. To finish off, I want to end with a quote from Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek. I love this quote because it's absolutely true. He says “Things are only impossible until they're not.” It reminds me of the whole four-minute-mile thing. Nobody thought anybody could break four minutes a mile and then once somebody ran four minutes or under four minutes, everybody starting doing it. Well, not everybody, but more people did it because they knew it wasn't impossible anymore. Cheers. Take care and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.