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The 6 Best Free Design Tools to Create Social Media Graphics

2017-10-31 | Guide | No Comments

The 6 Best Free Design Tools to Create Social Media Graphics

In the past, it was more than enough to share an image on social media every now and then. Now, if you’re not using images, you’re already behind.  The images you create should immediately catch your follower’s eyes and contain something that will influence them to click and share and continue looking for the next great thing you post. You also don’t want to spend a lot of time or money creating these images, because social media posts have a very short lifecycle.

The great news is there are a lot of tools out there to create engaging images that stand out on social media, and many of the best are free.

 

 

Canva is one of the best free tools for powerful template-based graphics creation. It offers a wide range of templates, image and illustration assets, dozens of fonts and text styles. The best thing about Canva is that it doesn’t matter if you’ve never designed an image in your life. It uses a simple drag and drop interface that allows beginners to start quickly and with just a minimal effort to create high-quality images that are great for sharing on social media or blog, design attractive graphics, presentations, and posters.

 

 

This free tool lets you choose from several professional templates sorted by industry category, design type, and size and then customize that template with easy to use filters. You can also replace template images with one from Adobe’s royalty-free library, or one of your own uploads. Unlike many tools, Spark makes it easy for you to change the design layout or even the entire template. Beyond their “post” graphic design type, Spark also provides two other project types: pages and videos.  

 

 

Created by the social media scheduling tool, Buffer, Pablo is the best tool for quickly creating great social media images.  The workflow is very simple: Choose a template or just an image for your blank template provided by sites like Unsplash and Pixabay. From there, choose from one of three sizes, each fitted specifically for Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook/Twitter. Image customization is limited—choose from a few preset filters, designed to provide the right level of contrast between your image and your text.

 

 

Desynger is a mobile app that lets you design polished social media images. Start with a template for the social media network of your choosing, or start from scratch. From there, build your design with Desygner’s library of royalty-free images and design elements such as shapes and icons. Even in its mobile app, Desygner doesn’t skimp on features. Multiple menus allow you to hyper-customize image and text settings, while never becoming cumbersome to use on a small screen. Desynger’s web app works almost identically, with sidebar menus to help you select the design assets and effects you need.

 

 

Snappa is ideal for text-heavy social media images. It includes a thorough template library, although it puts more emphasis than other apps on getting the background image just right. From there, Snappa offers an effects sidebar that helps you create the perfect image effects for your post–whether that means darkening or coloring the background image to make white text pop or brightening the image to highlight dark text.  Snappa is similarly thorough when it comes to text. Easily edit your text from the sidebar, adjusting font, size, alignment, line spacing, and opacity.

 

 

Best for more advanced social media graphic design. It includes many of the classic graphic design functions of tools like Photoshop, Sketch, and GIMP—such as layers, drawing tools, grouping, shapes, text, effects with a much more simplified, easy-to-learn interface. While Gravit Designer is ideal for building your own designs from scratch, it does come with a small library of templates, illustrations, and icons that are pre-sized for uses like blog posts and social media images.

These graphic design apps are great whether you want to draw extra attention to a blog post you’re sharing or you want to design a full-blown branded Facebook ad campaign.

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By Eva Piperevska

5 tips to grow your travel business with online marketing

2017-10-26 | ALL, Guide, Tutorials and how to's | No Comments

5 tips to grow your travel business with online marketing

The internet over the past few years has become an important marketing channel that funnels most of the bookings and sales in this industry. It affects how travel agencies reach their customers, how they promote their tours, and even how they do their bookings.

With that stated – online marketing can be a single marketing tool for tour providers and travel agencies to get started or grow their business.

But in order to grow a successful business, they will need to understand how online marketing works, where can they find their customers and how to optimise to get the most out of it.

Here are several tips you can take into consideration if you plan to promote your travel business using online marketing tools:

Tell a story (Blog)

When you want to promote a travel destination you must be good at digital storytelling. Telling a story in your social media campaigns with quality content is inevitable. To do that use pictures, videos and real-life stories in the description of your travel destination to catch reader’s attention. Know your audience and be creative. Share them on social networks.

Engage Customers through Social Media

Social media is the part of the online marketing that can bring the most value for tour operators and travel agencies. Tough it’s important to know how to use each network and on which of them you can find your targeted audience.

Also, you need to share and post daily, become likable, but don’t go all promotional all the time. Instead, have fun. Publish beautiful pictures, create conversations, answer questions. Join the industry groups on LinkedIn and Facebook to find partnerships and share experiences.

Integrate Direct Booking on your Website

Direct booking from your website can shorten your customers time and increase your conversion rate. Having a multi-function Book Now button on your website allows more control over your small tour business. Once you start driving traffic to one place you can easily have control on the booking process and have a view on the customer experiences in one place.

Use the information from Popular Travel Marketplaces

Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, or Touristlink, promote tours through customer reviews. That is the best option for free promotion with organic traffic. Those reviews are seen from people all over the world. And people trust them. So use this channel to increase the traffic to your website and along with that your bookings.

Be Mobile

Did you know that 87% of internet users have a smartphone? Is your website mobile friendly? A lot of customers today read posts, emails, and website content through their mobile devices. So when you start publishing your content online –   check how it appears on your smartphone or tablet screen. You also need to know if your page has fast load time, big pictures, easy navigation, search and selection, and clear call to actions. There are a lot of tools you can use to make your website more friendly – from Mobile Friendly test to free WordPress plugins perfect for mobile optimization.

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By Eva Piperevska

SMALL BUSINESS GUIDE: HOW TO SET UP A BASIC SEO

2017-09-19 | Guide | No Comments

SMALL BUSINESS GUIDE: HOW TO SET UP A BASIC SEO

When starting an online business there are several key elements involving your website that you must do and have. From a well-made website, good design, readable content to excellent SEO.

So today we are sharing with you several easy things you can do while setting up your basic SEO when launching your website for your business.

On-Site SEO – Research and create your metadata.

  1. First, you need to use the Google Keyword Tool to research meta keywords that are mostly searched by your potential customers on Google. This tool will give you an idea on which keywords you should use in your metadata as primary keywords.
  2. Crease a meta title that explains your business in one sentence and meta description that will give the searchers detail info about what you do. Use SEOMOFO to check if you are in-line with the guidelines. Keep in mind that this data should include your meta keywords.
  3. If your website is on WordPress you can use the free plugins such as All in One SEO, Platinum SEO, and SEO by Yoast. You can also get SEO suggestions by using premium plugins such as Scribe SEO. This way it will be much easier for you to implement the metadata in your website code without any knowledge in programming
  4. Keep in mind for the additional on-site SEO elements like internal links help search engines learn more about your website by internally linking to other pages on your website within your content; Header Tags are HTML header tags that help break the content into sections as well as let search engines know more about what each section of content is about. There is <H1></H1> tags surround the post title, <H2></H2> and <H3></H3> tags surround subheadings on the page
  5. Image Name & ALT Tags – If you have images on your website, you need to have good keywords for both the image name and the alt tag.

Quality content is a must. Today on the internet there are so many websites that are unique in their own way. If you want to have a unique website as well, you need to create a unique content that will connect to your industry. So keep in mind to enrich your website with content like Blog posts, Industry Articles, Tutorials & How-To Guides, Infographics or Videos.

Off-Site Optimization or so-called Link Building – Link building is one of the most must-have SEO tasks. The basic goal is to get other websites to link to yours. That way you can increase your Google website rank and your website will show up higher in the organic search results. What you need to is:

  1. Submit guest blog posts to popular blogs in your industry.
  2. Reach out to related businesses if they will link your website. In most cases, this will show up in their partner’s page
  3. Create social media profiles
  4. Submit your website to applicable industry directories
  5. Create links worth linking

Monitor your results – By using tools such as Authority Labs or Google Analytics you can monitor your SEO progress by reviewing your results. Here you need to set up goals that you want to achieve in order to review SEO metrics. Some of those goals can be website visits, purchases of a product, signups or registrations, downloads of a white-paper, clicks on a link etc.

By setting up your basic SEO you can improve the initial ranking of your website. That can give a clear and fast start to your first organic visits and first customers without any advertising.

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By Eva Piperevska

Simple guide to influencer marketing for small businesses

2017-07-28 | ALL | No Comments

influencer marketing envoice

As a longtime online marketer with almost 10 years experience, I have had many opportunities to work for businesses that are looking to find their market in the b2b segment. In the sea of marketing tactics and strategies, most small businesses tend to get creative and cheap or free techniques, instead of using the standard advertising techniques like TV, Radio and Print media. In most cases, small business and startups focus on interactive techniques to share their messages to the exact targeted audience, which will bring them more credibility, popularity, trust, and sales.

Among those tactics is the influencer marketing.

But what is Influencer Marketing and how you as a small business owner can use it to gain more customers?

In short and simple influencer marketing can be defined as the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth marketing. Or in other words letting other people (usually someone who has a decent amount of followers on the internet and is a specialist in his or hers field) tell the story of your brand to his or hers audience.

Why Influencer Marketing?

Well, it proved in the past few years that people can easily buy products from other people that are their idols or heroes.

Who is an influencer?

These days in the world of the internet everyone can be an influencer. As long as they have a small or huge audience. Even you reading this can be an influence to some degree as you sharing specific content which will be some kind of influence on your audience and particular individuals following you.

But the ultimate question is should you as a small business use Influencer Marketing?

If you have money – yes, if you don’t have money it will be a challenge, but it’s worth to try. If we compare the cost per action, there is a significant difference between the PPC cost and Price Per Influence, and most of the time, the second one is very very expensive.

So if you are really up for using Influencer Marketing into your business strategy and you have the financial support for that, you can potentially follow these steps:

Find out what is your buyer persona?

Who are they admiring on the internet? Who is their favorite internet person that they follow everyday? You can use tools like mention.com or buzzsumo.com to identify potential influencers that have an influence on your targeted customers.

Gather as much content as possible.

When an influencer starts promoting your brand you need to have a tonne of content to back up his. A tool that can assist you with that is serpwoo.com.

Make a plan to support your influencer marketing campaign with additional campaigns like remarking, email marketing and social media marketing. That way you will reach to customers that just got a glance of your products or services by the like remarking, email marketing and social media marketing. That way you will reach to customers that just got a glance of your products or services by the influencer.

Contact the influencer.

Before you start sending emails, create a list of potential influencers you want to contact. Research them online, see what are they famous for and write it down.

 

Send a nicely written email.

There are few tips when it comes to writing an email to influencer:

  1. Write a straightforward subject line. Make it look like a headline, short and to the point. Don’t be vague and informal. Make sure to mention your company and what the opportunity is. Ex. Join the Awesome Bloggers Network
  2. For greeting, go with first name only, unless they refer to themselves on their blog as Mr., Mrs., Dr., etc. There’s no need to bring titles when you’re aiming to open a comfortable back and forth line of communication. Introduce yourself in an open manner. Tell them your first name, your title, and the company you work for. Link to your site. Most influencers will not bother to search or type the name of your business to learn more. Make their life easier.Ex.  My name is [First Name]. I’m the [Position] at Awesome.example-email-influencer1
  3. Let them know what is what you are aiming to – your business goal. Get to the point quickly about what you’re looking to do.  Keep it brief using one or two sentences.Ex. We’d like to offer you an exclusive position in that network.
  4. Give them a reason to write your email. Shoot the incentive and explain why you would like them to endorse your brand. Here is very important to use the research you have done because each influencer has different incentive key points. Also give them a unique, researched reason why they should be working with you.
  5. Influencers are busy people so make sure to explain that they commitment will not be time-consuming for them.Ex. We’re not looking for a heavy commitment. All we would ask of you for a monthly post on a topic of your choosing
  6. Share an interesting fact about your brand – service or product. Ex. Awesome currently 3500 active users, 5000 likes on Facebook, 2600 followers on Twitter and strong will to grow our audience even more.
  7. Set up a deadline and end the email short and sweet. Ex. The deadline for accepting our offer is July 31st, please let me know if you need more information for our side. I look forward hearing from you.
  8. Write interesting specific content for your niche and mention them in it. That way when you share it on social media they will most likely share it.

BONUS:

Here is a list of the most popular influencers online today – among them are: Logan Paul, Cassey Ho, Emily Henderson, and much more.

 

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By Eva Piperevska