by: AskPat 514 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 514 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today.
As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.
All right, here's today's question from Jordan.
Jordan: Hey Pat. My name is Jordan, I'm the maker of a new online brand for gamers, to help them achieve their goals, called New Game+. Our first product is New Game+ Magazine, which you can find at www.medium.com/new-game-magazine.
So basically, my question is, I know that graphics for your blog are a really good investment. The problem is I don't think I really have that kind of investment to make for blog post images. So I was wondering, is there a particular price that you charge, or that you pay, for a graphic designer to create images for your podcast episodes and your blog posts? Yeah, basically I'm wondering, how much do you pay and how worth it is the investment? All right, thank you, Pat. Have a good day.
Pat Flynn: Hey Jordan, what's up? Thank you so much for the question. Could you provide me any help on Star Wars Battlefront? Because that's my latest game that I've been getting into. I kind of reward myself with a little bit of playing time after things like AskPat. Actually, this is the final episode of the week, and, as a result, because I batch-record these things, I'm going to be playing 30 minutes of Battlefront. And I'm terrible at it right now because I haven't gotten into first-person shooter games in a while. Anyway, probably shouldn't talk about this right now because your question is more important, but anyway, just let me know.
Anyway, going back to your question. So how important are these images? Well, they're extremely important, and I think you know that, which is why you're asking this question. But let's talk about really quick, for anybody else out there, why images are really important for your blog and for social media. Well, we are a visual species. We remember and we see and we notice things that are visual more than anything else. Just think of your social stream. We see these images, these great-looking graphics with some sort of image and then text overlaid on it, it pops. And not everybody's doing that, which means that you should be doing that if that makes sense.
I have a person, his name is Dustin. He's awesome. He's done a lot of things for me, the cover of my books, and all the podcast graphics and blog post graphics that you see on the site, and he's on my team. So I pay him a certain amount to work on an hourly basis, and he does a great job.
Now, a lot of times that's not possible for people because they are bootstrapping, or they're starting and they don't have a team member yet. And when I started it, it was all me. So I was very lucky, actually, because I had Photoshop experience, to be able to create those graphics on my own. If you have any of that experience, that's where I would start. Use something like Photoshop, or there is some other photo editing software you can use. But those ones are kind of complicated.
Now, I will mention two resources that are going to help you, and I believe there is a way to get access to these for free or get a free trial at least, or use the minimum sort of available clip art and images and backgrounds that you could use to make really great-looking graphics, that you could use on your blog, on your podcast episodes, and on social media.
First one, by far my favorite and top recommended, is canva.com. Now, this is you creating these images, but the interface and the way that you create, it makes it really fast and easy and it looks great. Again, that's canva.com. The other one is PicMonkey.com, sort of works in the same way. So I recommend you check those things out first because those are great.
Now, if you're going to use stock images, there's a lot of illustrations and graphics, you've seen stock images before, with people and items and things that have meaning for the podcast episodes that you have coming out, or the blog posts, or what have you. Or that quote that you have in mind that you want to post on social media. You won't be able to use a lot of those kinds of things on Canva and PicMonkey, you'll see what's available there.
Yes, you can upgrade to get access to certain stock images that you can then use in Canva, and they make it very easy for you to add quotes on top of it and things like that. And actually, there's also an app. If you are on the go, and you want to use an app, there's one called Word Swag, which I believe is $2.99 to buy, which is really cheap. But you can take an image or find an image online, and I'll talk about how to do that in a second, or how not to do that in a second, but you can use Word Swag to make it really easy to put text on top of any images on your mobile device, or at least on your iPhone, I'm sure. I believe there's Android-compatible or Android versions of something like Word Swag that you could really easily find online.
Now, going back to these images. It's really important that, if you're going to find images online, that you don't just take images from Google Images. That's the easiest thing to do, obviously, but you can get into a lot of trouble, because Google shows you all images, including ones that are copyrighted, and ones that you shouldn't be using. Although that's a practice that a lot of people do, it's what they shouldn't be doing. And I've known people, people who are high up there actually, who have gotten in trouble because they've made that mistake. So don't make that mistake. I would just avoid Google Images altogether.
There are a couple of places that you could go to to get images for free, however, that you can then use. However, you want to make sure to be careful, because you have to abide by the rules if you do this. Now, there are stock websites, royalty-free websites, where you can pay to get access to stock images. And they do give away some images for free that you can then use freely. But you want to make sure, again, you abide by the rules. And my favorite are istockphoto.com, which is pretty expensive actually. And then there's depositphotos.com, which I recommend. That's my favorite stock photo website. Appsumo.com does a lot of deals with Depositphotos, where you can get, I think, a hundred credits, or even more than a hundred credits, for like thirty-five bucks, and they run that a few times a year, I think. So pay attention to appsumo.com, Noah Kagan and the team over there does a really good job of getting good deals for us on things like that.
Now, in terms of getting images for free to use, I know a lot of people who get images from the Creative Commons area on Flickr. So if you go to flickr.com, and then you go into the Creative Commons area, that's where you can use images for your own use. But, depending on the image, and depending on the photographer, or the person who owns that image, they allow you to do certain things, or not do certain things with it. For instance, sometimes you'll be able to edit it and crop it and add things on top of it, and other times you cannot. Now, I'm not going to get into the details of what you can and can't do, and that's something you could read about there. But just make sure that when you take somebody else's image, that you are using it and you are allowed to. And if you're not sure, the best thing you could do is always ask. And again, like I said, I would just stay away from Google Images.
But I think for those of us who are just starting out and bootstrapping, Canva is a great place, canva.com, and PicMonkey. So, again, canva.com—actually, just let me make sure it's canva.com and not .net. Yup, canva.com, the world's easiest to use design program. So go ahead and check that out, it's awesome. Canva.com, and also picmonkey.com.
So, Jordan, hope that answers the question. I appreciate you calling in today and asking your question. Thank you so much. We're going to send you and AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And I also want to thank those of you who have asked questions, and who are going to ask questions. If you have a question that you'd like to ask, head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.
I also want to thank today's sponsor. Actually, no, there is no secondary sponsor on today's episode. But I do want to thank those of you who listened and those of you who have been very, very supportive of my upcoming book, which I will mention. I don't pay myself for this. But I'm giving myself time to talk about this.
This is my upcoming book, which is coming out February 1. Please head on over to willitflybook.com, you can check it out. It's called Will It Fly? How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don't Waste Your Time and Money. And it's perfect for those of you who are just starting out. And even those of you who have had businesses, even for a while, who are stuck and you want to make sure that your time is spent exactly where it needs to be spent. It's a validation book, to help you validate your ideas so that you know that they're going to work or that they're not going to work. So you can make decisions now instead of regretting decisions that you make two years down the road, three years down the road, which a lot of people do. So go ahead and check it out. Again, willitflybook.com, excited to share it with you on February 1, and I appreciate you guys.
Thank you so much, and here's a quote to finish off the week, and today, of course, by Abraham Lincoln. Short, but sweet. This is, “Whatever you are, be a good one.”
Take care, and I look forward to serving you next week, and in the next episode of AskPat. Until then, thank you so much, and appreciate it. Take care. Love you. Bye.