Business Inspiration Tips

How to Use Canva: 101 AMAZING Designs You Can Create (Includes Printable) Disclaimer: Please note: The designs featured and mentioned in this blog post are for inspirational purposes ONLY and will help you see that you can use. Now on to the post! I did something crazy last weekend….   I challenged myself to come up with an  extensive  list on how to use Canva for graphic and visual design. 101 ways to be exact… Crazypants I know…. But I never back down from a challenge yall. Why? Well because in my world of digital marketing and branding,  Canva  is seriously #BAE for me. In two of my most recent blog posts about  Canva for bloggers and  Canva course creators , I covered on several ways that peeps can use the program for their visual design needs. But my obsession with Canva didn’t stop there.   On last year, I wrote a blog post that talks about how I use the program to  build out my entire visual arsenal  and even created  blog branding ki

Secrets to Gain 1000+ Followers on 5 Social Media Platforms   Beth Worthy  21st Jul The following guide on growing a social media audience examines the steps involved in getting your first thousand fans for each of the top 5 social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram. With each social network you must first completely fill out your profile information in order to maximize your following. Facebook Since Facebook is the most popular social search engine, it’s the easiest to build a quick following. As with all social networks, the key to building a vibrant following is to engage with as many other people as possible. One of the reasons for Facebook’s success is the ease of the media tools it offers for sharing videos and photos. Each thread becomes part of a bigger story that can be characterized as personalized media. Here are the steps to building a Facebook following: Use Invite Option Direct followers from various networks and email Optimize yo

Understanding Design  Strategy By:  Terry Lee Stone  | February 22, 2013 This post is an excerpt from the feature article  Understanding Design Strategy  by Terry Lee Stone in HOW Magazine.  Click here  to download the full article, or get the entire issue  here ! 5.6K In the broadest sense, “strategy” is a plan for how to achieve a goal. In business, strategy bridges the gap between policy (guidelines governing action) and tactics (a set of techniques). Strategy is what a company develops to differentiate itself from competitors’ actual or predicted moves. It’s complex and it drives every decision a business makes. Our clients’ business strategies also form the framework for our design strategies. While these are interrelated, they are not the same thing. Design strategy, as a field of theory and practice, refers to the integrated, holistic planning process examining the interplay between design and business strategy. However, for most graphic designers, design strategy simply re

Inbound Marketing 101: A Beginner’s Guide June 18th, 2015   •    no comments    •   Author:  Walter Lim     Share65 Tweet Share Pin7 WhatsApp Reddit 72SHARES Save Do you know what  Inbound Marketing is? Keen to use inbound marketing to improve your marketing ROI? Pioneered by co-founders of  HubSpot  Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, inbound marketing is a leading Business to Business (B2B) digital marketing strategy. The fact that HubSpot is a NASDAQ listed marketing automation company  worth $1.24 billion in market capitalisation  is a testimony to inbound marketing’s strengths. Written by Halligan and Shah,  Inbound Marketing   covers the fundamentals of inbound marketing, and how one can  “get found using Google, Social Media and Blogs” . Spanning the breadth of using content to generate leads, acquire prospects and convert customers, the book straddles content marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media and other related areas. Wha

113 Visual Marketing Tools and Apps The creation of visual elements is a huge part of a successful online marketing strategy. Whether you need a blog article’s header, a social media post, an entire ebook, infographic or a slide deck, there are tools out there that can help make your life easier. These tools save us time, energy, and can turn an amateur’s creativity into something that looks straight out of a design school. Here are 113 visual marketing tools you might want to take a look at... Editing and Visual Creation Visual marketers need tools that make the creation of something beautiful easy. Now, we could tweak and edit and import and fuss with an image and quote overlay for six hours and get it looking perfect, but where’s the ROI in that? If we’re creating a social media post with an inspirational quote, turning data into brand message or creating an entire infographic, we need to do it before lunch. The tools in this section are awesome shortcuts - software that tak