Great Resources to Create Beautiful Images for Social

There isn’t one answer, but many. And as usual, the Internet comes to the rescue. Below we look at easy-to-use tools that you can work into your content strategy to create quality imagery while saving time and money. These are 16 of the best image resources we’ve found, and they have one vital thing in common: they make the life of a social marketer a whole lot easier.

Full-service image creators

Canva

For a social marketer, the biggest value Canva provides is simplicity: create striking imagery by just dragging and dropping elements into place. No design experience? No problem. Plug text or photos into their ready-made layouts or produce something from scratch.

IBeFunky

Much like Canva, BeFunky is a one-stop shop for graphic creation and collages. Choose layouts based on function: social media headers, blogger resources, and small business templates are among the options. Customizations come quickly and easily with the company’s user-friendly interface.

Design assets

Creative Market

For those who delve deeper into the design world, Creative Market has a massive catalog of ready-to-use fonts, templates, mockups, and stock photos produced by incredible talents. With a vision in mind, finding what you need is a cinch, and even if your creative flow is running dry, Made with Creative Market has infinite inspiration. Not sure where to get started? Creative Market gives out six free products every week to start a collection of assets with.

Free stock photos

Unsplash

Unsplash has a model that’s hard to beat: “Free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos.” The organization dishes out 10 stunning new photos every 10 days shot by photographers in their skilled community. Finding the right image to accompany a social post can be a challenge so Unsplash is gold for a social marketer. Under the Creative Commons Zero license, you can copy, alter, redistribute, and even use their photos commercially. It’s the ultimate creative freedom.

Pexels

Great photography sparks emotion. Emotion sells. End of story. A great photo can be the backbone of any social post, and Pexels is another valuable site with access to a growing database of free stock photos. At the moment, the company boasts more than 4,500 photos under the Creative Commons Zero license, and they’re adding at least 70 new images per week.

Data visualization

Infogr.am

It’s no question that including compelling data in your content strategy is an effective way of engaging your audience. Infogram is data visualization at its finest. The platform makes repackaging information a painless process. Though you can choose from a multitude of options and designs, from creating complex infographics to simple charts, the experience is far from overwhelming.

Easel.ly

Creating an infographic from scratch doesn’t have to be an arduous task. If you’re up for the challenge, you can make your own using Easel.ly. Choose from a slew of ready-to-use templates or create your own. The real value is in the drag-and-drop interface and the ease of plugging in your own data.

Photo editor/enhancer

Hootsuite Enhance

Trying to remember the optimal image sizes for each social network is, quite frankly, a pain in the butt. Use Hootsuite Enhance, our new photo editing app, to ensure your images are cropped and sized perfectly for each social network. You can also use Enhance to make your images more exciting by adding filters, borders, stickers, text, or a watermark of your company’s logo. If you’ve run out of ideas or images to post, you can browse through a selection of stock photos in Enhance that are free for commercial use. And in true Hootsuite fashion, you can share images from Enhance straight to the social networks of your choice—including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more—or schedule them for later using the Hootsuite mobile app.

Pixlr

The entire Pixlr suite includes a wide range of tools that come in handy for a social media manager—starting with the web-based photo editor, a free alternative to Photoshop. Pixlr Express functions much like Instagram in that you can apply different color effects to your images and adjust their strengths. It also includes creative overlays, stickers, and the ability to add text. Pixlr’s collection of web-based apps helps beautify your images.

Snapseed

Editing and enhancing photos on the go is a snap (pun intended) using the Snapseed mobile app. You don’t have to be seasoned in complicated photo editing software to easily understand how it works. Swipe up, down, left, and right to create your desired effect. Your smartphone can be a powerful tool for generating original content for your social pages.

Photo overlays

Over App

Over is a powerful tool that goes far beyond just adding text to images—though that’s how it’s best known to the market. Even choosing from preset social dimensions just scratches the surface of the app’s features. With a recent update, it now allows for blending, taking color samples, adding image overlays, and offers striking ready-made artwork. New integration with Unsplash, the free stock photo site also mentioned on this list, means Over is a graphic creations powerhouse.

Phonto

Phonto, the app that allows you to add creative text to images, is a minute marketer’s dream: import an image, add text, style it, and share. Of course, the real art is selecting the right font and impeccably placing your design. The best part? Phonto won’t cost you a dime.

Visual quotes

Recite

Time is on your side with Recite, an effortless solution for creating images from quotes. Sharing quotes is often an effective method for garnering engagement on social. Boasting a straightforward user experience, the process has been stripped down to its core. Just type your quote into the text box, choose from a handful of templates below it, click ‘Create’, and bam! Download or share straight to one of your social pages.

Photo re-sizer

Autre Planete’s Social Media Image Maker

Optimizing image dimensions for each social channel can be a hassle: it’s time-consuming and you have no choice but to keep up with social image specs that are constantly being modified. Autre Planete’s Social Media Image Maker is a convenient resource for cropping photos or graphics to the right size.

Bonus: Download a free cheat sheet to quickly find the best image sizes for every social network and learn how you can use Hootsuite to easily add them to any post.

Annotations

Skitch

Annotate much? If so, Skitch might be for you. An Evernote product, Skitch provides all the tools necessary to add visual commentary to any image. Use arrows, text, stickers, and a handful of other tools to get your message across on a screenshot or any image of your choice. It’s a helpful app for support or community teams that have to answer complicated technical user questions.

Mockups

PlaceIt

Mockups galore! Sometimes you just need an image of your website or app and a screenshot just won’t cut it. Place It offers a wide variety of mockups to showcase the image of your choosing. Upload it right into a template and voila! Download a free low-res version or buy it in a higher resolution.

How to Create Your Own Remarkable Images

It is nothing new to hear that using remarkable images for your blog posts is an important part of presenting your work to your viewers. Pictures and images can either make or break a product’s or article’s success. Why is that?

Well, most of us are very visual people and are either drawn in or turned off by certain colors or images that we come in contact with. In fact, we’re trained to be this way thanks to all the media and advertisements that we’ve been visually bombarded with since childhood.

Due to this need for creating visually appetizing imagery, many have found great success as graphic designers and other similar creative careers. However, for as much as many of us would love to be able to jump in and start using Photoshop and Illustrator to create and design amazing graphics and images today, such an idea is too far out of reach.

Those programs take time to learn and they cost a boatload of money — both of which many people can’t always swing, especially when they just want to create something here and there.

In the past, creating those creative, captivating and dynamic images was something that the average person couldn’t do without the help of a designer or experienced photo editor. However, as time has gone on, the need for easy ways to create your own images is one that has grown and continues to do so.

Why Create Unique Images?

Is there good reasons to create your own images to use in your posts? I mean, sure, they can be a fun little side thing to do after tediously editing your post, but are there benefits?

Absolutely! Here are a few benefits you may not have thought of.

People Like To Look At Something New

Since stock photos are widely used, then people who use them run the risk of using something that someone else in a similar niche or post topic has already used or will use soon. This can result in viewers seeing the same picture on two different sites that aren’t related to each other. Though it’s generally not that big of a deal, this sort of thing does happen.

Another great reason to create your own images is that you can create an image that relates directly to your post at hand and is unlike anything that your viewers have seen before. Create something truly epic and you can increase the chance of getting more social shares and more traffic — it’s a win-win situation.

It Is A Lot Less Expensive

Why spend a ton of money every month on stock photos when you can create your own butt-kicking images for a few bucks or for free? Many of the options below that I will list will give you the chance to source free images that you can use to create unique pictures on free image creating or editing platforms.

That means that all you’ll be spending is a bit of time and creativity to create something really cool.

Better For SEO

Queen Google is all about authentic and unique, and anything that falls below that standard is not all that impressive to her. Even though stock and vector photos can be brilliant and appealing to the eye, so many people have jumped on board with using them that they’re no longer unique.

Although it is true that the Google bots that crawl a site cannot literally see a photo as we do, Google’s algorithm is becoming increasingly smarter and can detect if a photo is indeed — unique. It’s not certain how large the effect of using stock photos is for SEO, but even if the impact was small, there is still an impact that you could avoid. By creating your own images, you are sticking to Google’s new rules of creating a whole post that is truly individual and evergreen.

Ready to dive in? Let’s go!

Sourcing Truly Free Images To Create A Unique Image

There are quite a few sites where you can source and download pictures free of charge. However, the ones that I’ll list below are likely ones that you have comes across before.

New Old Stock

Looking for a photo with a vintage feel? How about using authentic, vintage images fro public archives that are free of any known copyright restrictions? New Old Stock has a ton of truly vintage that you could use as part of your image creation.

But I’m not done yet. These sites and the photos on them are merely suggestions to provide a base for your image creation. Simply using them may be fine for some, but I want to show you how you can take these pictures and create something entire unique from them.

StockSnap.io

StockSnap photos are beautiful, captivating and free to use. The images on the site fall under the Creative Commons CCO License which means that you can copy, modify and distribute their images for whatever purpose you have in mind without needing permission or having to pay. The search bar makes it easy to find a photo that fits your needs.

Life Of Pix

This is another site where you can go and source beautiful imagery that are free and have no copyright restrictions. The Gallery on the site organizes the photos into certain categories to make finding a type of picture easier. As a side note, they also have videos free of copyright restrictions.

Creating Your Unique Images

Canva

This is probably my favorite online image creating platform. I was lucky enough to stumble across it after it first launched and I’ve been hooked ever since.

You can choose from one of the preset design options like a Twitter or Facebook post that you can use and set that as your featured image for your site or you can set your own custom dimensions and go from there.

Each of the predesigned options come with a set of images and design ideas that you can use to help jumpstart your image, but if you’re feeling truly creative, you can start from scratch and use the thousands of free shapes, lines, icons, fonts, and banners to create anything from a captivating photo to a stunning infographic.

Just as an example, you can see the image I created here using nothing more than the fonts, lines and banners available on Canva. Since everything I used was from the free options in the editor (there are both free and premium elements), I am free to download and use the image as I please and all it took was a bit of my time.

You can use this for more than creating a blog post image. You can create Twitter or Facebook headers, design a poster, create a unique Instagram picture and a large infographic image. There are options to upload your own images and icons so that you use your own elements in your design.

Piktochart

If you’re looking to create an infographic for your site or blog post, then this is an awesome site where you can do just that. The great thing about this type of imagery is that people tend to gobble them up. When an infographic is done right, they tend to get shared like crazy. Therefore, spending the time to craft one is well worth the effort.

Piktochart lets you choose from a selection of both free and premium templates, but you can skip the predesigned options available and create something from scratch for free. If you’re a creative person, then designing one of these shouldn’t be too hard, but you can always look for inspiration via a Google Search.

The editing options within Piktochart also make it easy to design more than just infographics. There are options on the site to create reports, banners, and presentations. You can also shrink the size of the canvas and create a smaller but stunning blog post image too.

Pic Monkey

Pic Monkey is a free online photo editing and creating tool. The free service lets you edit an existing image or design an entirely new one and it comes with some great features that make it easy to do so.

Crop and resize pixels of an image
Sharpen and adjust exposure
Apply visual effects like Black and White or Sepia Filters
Add fonts, textures, frames, and overlays to images. You can even upload your own overlays or icons to use in the picture.

If you don’t want to use an image like the ones available on the sites mentioned above, then thats fine. You can edit the canvas size and color and build on that instead. There are certain features on the editor that require you to upgrade to the pro version of PicMonkey, but most of what you need to create a new picture is free.

Google Slides

Though Google Slides was designed for creating presentations, you can utilize it for creating images for your article as well. You don’t have to stick with the predesigned layouts and themes there either. There are plenty of online resources where you can source free Google Slide Templates and use them to create a captivating image.

You can upload your own background and other images, have access to and use all the 400+ Google Fonts and plenty more to help you craft a unique image.

The bottom line

Creating an image from scratch may seem like just another time-consuming and unnecessary task to add to the workload of creating a blog post, however, don’t view it that way.

Creating unique images can captivate your viewers, it’s something Google says it wants, and it can boost your shares and traffic to that post and website in general. Really, creating your own stunning image could be the best part of your entire post. Plus, just think of the money you can save by doing this instead of paying for stock photos that everyone is already using.

All the image creating resources listed above take a bit of time to learn, but they’re much easier to use than something like Photoshop and Illustrator; playing around with one for an hour or so will have you on the right path in no time.

There are sure to be plenty of other free options for creating images for your blog posts. Do you have a favorite resource for doing this? Be sure to share in the comments below.

Social Media Performance: 10 Ways to Reduce Sources of Frustration

Spending hours learning how to implement the smallest improvements on your social media performance is my biggest source of frustration. Hands down the biggest for me.

You probably understand how important it is to give your visitors a great reader experience.

And to do that, you need to optimize many areas of your social media as well as your blog.

I love to read, learn, and try new things. Like new apps for my smartphone and iPad. Often, I’ll see something that I want to try, save, and connect with other new apps I am using.

Ideas that come from previously unconnected planes of thought.

There are many apps for workers looking to improve social media performance that can be a big help in this regard. And less wasted time? Yes, very good for that also.

Related: 12 Extraordinary Graphic Design Tools You Should be Using

Ponder for a moment … the iPad, Cloud computing, and Apps. A few years ago, they barely existed. Now they’re an integral part of our lives. That swift journey from nonexistent to indispensable seems to happen a lot these days.

But it gives us unlimited access to improve our learning and utility for things like through apps and idea connection.

This makes you think: What social media apps were you not using two years ago that today you can’t imagine living without today?

Here are my favorite of these very essential apps. They will help you either create content faster or create content that wasn’t possible before.

VideoScribe

No doubt you’ve seen explainer videos before. They look as if someone is drawing images on the screen.

In most cases, they aren’t. They use a tool such as VideoScribe instead.

It is one of the coolest tools I’ve seen. It allows you to create different images and then pick a style of hand and pen.

Then, the tool puts all your images together to form a video. But the useful part is that it draws the images for you.

It loads the background first and then moves the hand around to make it look as if it’s drawing the other lines and pieces as they load.

Snov.io

Snov.io is the perfect all-in-one cold outreach automation platform you never realized you needed. With it, organizing your cold email campaign is streamlined to the max.

Snov.io Email Finder will find prospects’ emails on any website or a professional network in seconds – all you have to do is simply add them to the list. An inbuilt email verifier tool checks the emails for validity to boost the delivery rate.

Once your list is ready, it takes only a few minutes to create your first automated email campaign with triggered follow-ups. Snov.io’s Cold Email Sender with a drag-and-drop campaign builder lets you add triggers, delays, goals, and create personalized emails right in the campaign builder. You can watch the campaign statistics in real time: open, click, and reply rates are presented as nice visuals with percentages.

And for email marketers who want to pay special attention to specific clients and know exactly which ones are interested, Snov.io offers an Email Tracker – a forever free browser extension that doesn’t add any signatures, links or logos in the email body, and integrates seamlessly into your Gmail to help you monitor email opens and link clicks. A reminder feature has just been released with the latest update.

Social media performance … Buffer

Buffer has been one of the first social media marketing tools we have been using on a regular basis and it kind of stuck with us.

Buffer simply is awesome for scheduling tweets. And it has a free version that allows you to schedule up to ten tweets – that will get you far especially when you are just starting out on Twitter.

Buffer can also schedule posts for Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. I rarely use this function, however.

Either there are better ways for me to schedule posts for these networks, or I do not use a scheduling tool for them at all.

But for scheduling on Twitter, Buffer is simply the best there is. Also, take a look at the analytics part of Buffer which is great if you want to test headlines or tweet images.

Pablo

Another one of those simple design tools is Pablo.

This one is made by the same people behind Buffer. Pablo is extremely simple to use but focuses especially on social media images.

However, there’s no reason why you can’t use these in your blog posts as well.

Having images optimized for being shared on social media sites will increase the re-shares and, consequently, the traffic you’ll get.

On the right side menu, you have three sizes of images to choose from. For a blog post, you’ll probably want the “wide” picture or the square one:

Pick the size that corresponds with the image size used within your most important social network. This will change the size of the canvas in the middle.

Next, you’ll want to pick a background from the left side menu:

Finally, you can click the default text and type whatever you’d like.

Social media performance … Canva

Canva is my go-to tool when it comes to creating images for my online marketing. I am a design-moron. I admit it. When I started creating images for Pinterest, Facebook, and co. the first attempts simply were ugly.

And then I discovered Canva and the design templates they provide for free. And I learned a lot from them: About combining different color schemes, typefaces, and images.

Canva sets you up with the right dimensions for many different purposes like Pinterest posts, Facebook adds or Twitter headers.

They provide a couple of templates, some free, some for a fee. You can use a ton of elements in your design process and play around with filters.

The free account of Canva gets you far, if you need more templates or elements for your designs, you can pay for each element as you need them.

If you need more features, the Canva for work option may be for you.

If you need something to get started with designing graphics, you must try Canva’s design school, also free.

ManageFlitter

ManageFlitter is easily the best tool I know for managing your Twitter following. You can find accounts to follow; they help you find accounts you should unfollow.

ManageFlitter is the best tool to use in the follow-unfollow routine and help you grow a targeted audience.

Skitch

So far, we’ve looked at creating basic custom images that are mainly optimized for social sharing.

When I’m showing readers how to do something, I often include a picture of what it looks like.

Skitch annotations let you point out specific things on the screenshots. I find that very useful.

Broken Link Checker

Nothing disappoints a reader more than reading a post, seeing an interesting link, and then finding out that it’s broken.

But broken links are unavoidable; web pages die all the time.

However, it is a good idea to check for broken links once in a while and fix them.

To use this tool, enter your URL and the captcha code, and click the shiny yellow button.

It’ll take a minute or two to finish the scan. Any broken links will show up underneath.

Giphy

One way to make your content a little bit more exciting is by including gifs.

Giphy is a search engine specifically for gifs (like Google is for

web pages). You can type in any broad term and get many gifs as a result.

If you like one and would like to include it in your post, scroll down to the “share” section, and copy and paste the embed code into your post’s HTML tab:

Don’t go crazy with gifs, but one or two now and then can make your audience smile and enjoy the content a bit more.

Google’s Pagespeed Insights

Here’s another page speed tool, but it’s a bit simpler than most.

It should be used as a starting point, and then you can dig in further with other tools if need be.

Page speed is one of the confirmed ranking factors in Google. They care a lot about user experience, which is why they made this tool in the first place.

Again, enter your URL into the tool. It could be your homepage or a post:

It will quickly give you an overall score, not just for desktop users but for mobile users as well.

If you get 80 and above, you’re doing okay.

It will show the biggest issues (red – bad!; orange – not as bad) that you should address to improve your page loading speed.

More importantly, it also has a “show how to fix” link under each issue, so you get a little guidance to walk you through the solution.

Content Marketer

This tool was designed specifically for content marketers. It has a modern design, and it’s pretty intuitive to use.

There are three main functions, which are clearly laid out at the top of each project.

By scanning a post, the tool will compile a list of relevant contacts you could promote it to.

Then, it will find just about anyone’s email address.

The bottom line

Social media gives us a great opportunity to listen in on what people are saying. We’ve long known that word of mouth is incredibly powerful, now we can actually track it. Social listening tools are still somewhat primitive, but they are improving quickly and are already being deployed to help monitor conventional marketing efforts in real time.

Making your blog the best it can be takes a ton of work, but tools can help you accomplish it faster and easier.

I recommend you start by trying a handful of these tools at a time until you find the ones you have the most success with.

I realize that there are many other great tools out there. Share them in a comment below if I forgot the one that you love.

Need some help in building better customer insights from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your customer base?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job of growing customer insights and pay for results.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new insights that you have learned.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

Check out these additional articles on customer insights from our library:

Lessons from the Yale Customer Insights Conference

Small Business Customer Insights 101

Remarkable Marketing Using These 17 Customer Insight Techniques

A How-to Guide for Small Business Social Media Marketing

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.

Visual Content Tools That Can Skyrocket Your Blog Performance

When it comes to creativity in design with your social media marketing, I’ve found that there are many areas for improving your designs with these visual content tools. These include automation, communicating, engaging, and more.

When I look for helpful design tools, I often grab ones that make a difference in one or more of these areas.

Each of these social media visual content tools I’ve highlighted below fit into one of these categories. Here’s hoping that a bit of help in each area can unlock some creativity for you.

This author regularly discusses marketing tools, John Jantsch.

The design isn’t something that every marketer feels comfortable doing, but the reality is every one of us will need to design something at some point in our careers. Whether it’s a website, some sales collateral, or an ebook, there will be some design expertise required to finish the project.

The reason why we often get bogged down in it all is that often, we don’t know how to use the tools at our disposal to get high-quality designs. But here’s a little secret, marketers: You don’t need Photoshop to create great designs. Below are design tools even the most design-phobic marketers can use to create gorgeous visual content.

InstaQuote

When I’m on the go or especially at conferences, I use InstaQuote to easily create quotes to share with my Instagram and Twitter followers.

Unsplash

Instead of buying tons of image packs, I use Sunsplash’s free subscription service. It sends you ten new images every day.

All are high quality, and they’re released under CC0 meaning you can use them however you want, no copyrights. (editor’s note: currently it’s ten images every ten days).

PhotoGrid

**Employ social media content creation tools.**

PhotoGrid is an app that is used to share to Instagram, but you can use to create graphics to share anywhere. This app allows you to import non-square shaped photos onto a square background, edit backgrounds, add borders, and add text overlays to images to create compelling calls-to-action and motivational quotes to your images for unique and fresh visual content. Available on iPhone and Android.

PowerPoint

This usually gets a laugh or an aha moment. I love this simple software that most of us are comfortable with to create all my own personalized and branded content. It’s easy to use, manipulate, and create your designs without needing fancy software experience or training.

Chrome Eye Dropper

This is a fantastic free plug-in for Google Chrome that allows you to get the HEX color code for any color from a webpage. Very handy when you see a color you like and want to use it in your designs.

Canva

Who doesn’t love a tool that completely simplifies the graphic design process? I have been a fan of Canva since it’s inception and next to Photoshop, this is my daily go-to tool. Now that they’ve taken it from online to the app, it’s the perfect all-around tool.

It is a great a la carte platform – you have free options for templates, icons, and backgrounds; you can pay $1 for some images and backgrounds, or you can upload your own.

They also make the design process a little easier with templates already sized for each of the social networks, as well as suggested layouts that you can purchase or use for inspiration.

Canva is your one-stop-shop for easily creating customizable designs. You can search for a library of images, layouts, backgrounds, or upload your photos to include in your designs.

You can also choose to create social media posts headers, presentations, or any custom dimensions.

Then all you have to do is drag and drop your images into place, resize them, and voilà! Your images come to life.

Over

Over is an app available for Android and iPhone and one of my original go-to apps. While I love Wordswag as well, Over keeps me coming back with features that give me far more flexibility over the design.

QuotesCover

QuotesCover is a busy marketers dream! This online tools take the ease of Canva and marry it with the built-in templates and fonts of Over and Wordswag.

There are no design skills needed with QuotesCover. Simply add your text, choose your background and font and voila, you’re done!

NounProject

The NounProject is your best source to find all the icons you could ever dream of needing for your next design. All you have to do is search for the icon, and a few suggestions will come up with icons that you may be interested in.

The majority of these icons are free, but there are some you need to attribute if you use it (don’t worry, they provide clear instructions for each icon).

Selfie Stick

Part of the power of digital photography is that it allows us to experiment and have fun with our surroundings. It’s not just about selfies either. You can completely change the perspective of your images with this simple, quirky accessory.

Quick

When I want to add text to an image (again on mobile) the fastest and easiest way to do that for me is Quick. It’s from the same people who created Over (formerly Overgram) and for iOS users integrates into the native editing function so you can access it right from the edit screen in your photos app. Available on iOS and Android.

Evernote

This is where I keep my digital ideas. I use it on my smartphone, tablet, and laptop as well as with the Chrome Extension. No matter what device I’m on, I can easily locate what I need.

I like to create notes that have images, links, and sometimes just the title to build on while I’m thinking of my content.

Pictaculous

Pictaculous is a color palette generator and allows you to upload any image and get a matching color palette within seconds. If you have ever wondered what colors to use with a specific image, this will solve that problem.

WordSwag

content writing tools free — **Content writing tools free.**

I love Wordswag because I can create amazing graphics on the fly, from my phone! Recently, Wordswag updated their app to include a transparent background option. I love this upgrade because now I can use that transparent “text” on any photo.

ColorPicker

ColorPicker is a great tool to explore different colors that you may want to use in your design. Simply slide the arrows on the right bar up and down, and move the circle within the square from side to side to find the perfect color that you want to use. You can also save multiple colors at the bottom if you want to access them later.

ColorPicker provides the RGB and HEX colors so you can use the exact color while designing on other programs. It is a great tool to explore new colors and figure out exactly what you want to use in your designs.

Skitch

It’s awesome because it’s easy to take a screenshot. You can take a screenshot of some parts of your screen or the whole screen.

I love the built-in editor! You can add arrows, add text, draw on your image, pixelate, and add a marker or highlight some parts of your screenshot without noob-looking output. It’s like a premium ”˜paint’ tool.

Skitch might be one of my favorite design tools ever. Using Skitch, you can easily take screenshots and then annotate them. In the example below,

took a screenshot of the Skitch website (meta, I know), added an arrow to CTA to download Skitch for Mac, added some text on top of the image, and added a box around the sign-up CTA.

This program is great for any marketer who may be providing feedback on someone’s work or taking screenshots of content that need annotations.

Moldiv

This is a favorite iPhone photo collage editor app! It’s awesome because…

It’s slick. I love the design, and they don’t put too many ads, unlike other apps.

Lots of awesome features are available. You can adjust the frame, the background, add text and inject some cute stamps (really cute ones!) on your photo.

Super easy to use! You can save it to your camera roll, other apps and you can easily share it via Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Flickr.

PlaceIt

At some point in every marketer’s life, there comes a time when they need to take a screenshot to be used in a real-life scenario.

That’s where PlaceIt comes in. PlaceIt allows you to upload your screenshots and videos to be automatically inserted into various screens. This program makes it infinitely easier to provide professional-looking screenshots in real situations.

HubSpot Image Editor

Now live today for all HubSpot customers is an image editor right within your HubSpot account. Crop your images to dimensions for Twitter, Facebook, or any size you want. Add text, stickers, or frames, and draw anything you want right over the picture.

Adjust the brightness, take out red-eye, or add filters. The image can then be inserted right into your blog, web page, email, or social posts. If you want to make other changes to the original file, it will still be available right within HubSpot.

Google Fonts

We all need to mix it up with what fonts we use every once in a while. Well, did you know that Google offers hundreds of fonts that you can download for free?

You can even preview how the different fonts will look with whatever text you want. If you are putting a new headline on your website but want to see how it looks with your slogan, you can do that.

Or if you want to start experimenting with different fonts in your next design, you can download the font and immediately start using it.

GIFBrewery

You may have noticed that a cool thing you can do in your email marketing is to use animated GIFs to explain something or delight your subscribers. But many marketers don’t have the necessary software to create animated GIFs.

That’s where GIFBrewery comes in. It allows you to create GIFs from your screen recordings easily — and you can even crop the images, add commentary, or apply filters.

The bottom line

These are interesting tools, many of which we already know, of course. They are not rocket science and shouldn’t be. This list of little things simply reminds us of what we have forgotten.

Then it is up to us to put these lessons (or reminders) into daily use through persistence and practice. Remember … Your learning trumps all!

**Customer engagement improvements are worth the effort.**

Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

Building Infographics: 10 Tools to Become an Impressive Designer

Visuals have a huge impact in marketing. Not only do they make content more shareable — 40 times as much — but they help us retain information. When details are paired with an image, we remember 55% more of it. And that is even more so by building infographics. You would be hard pressed to top that performance.

I love to read, learn, and try new things. Like new apps for my smartphone and iPad. Often, I’ll see something that I want to try, save, and connect with other new apps I am using.

Ideas that come from previously unconnected planes of thought.

So to bring an important discovery to market, you first need to identify a real-world problem it can solve and connect to engineers who can transform it into a viable product or service. Then you need to find customers who are willing to drop whatever else they’ve been doing and adopt the innovation on a large scale.

There are many apps for workers looking to improve graphics design like me that can be a big help in this regard. And less wasted time? Yes, very good for that also.

Related: 12 Extraordinary Graphic Design Tools You Should be Using

Ponder for a moment … the iPad, Cloud computing, and Apps. A few years ago, they barely existed. Now they’re an integral part of our lives. That swift journey from nonexistent to indispensable seems to happen a lot these days.

But it gives us unlimited access to improve our learning and utility for things like through apps and idea connection.

This makes you think: What graphical design productivity apps were you not using two years ago that today you can’t imagine living without today?

Looking for images for infographics? Try this site.

Here are my favorites:

Visualize

This generator could be the start of how ‪résumés will be portrayed in the future

You can visualize your resume in one click and also take a look at previous examples.

Enabling people to express their professional accomplishments in a simple yet compelling personal visualization, we think this is the start of something big.

Visual.ly

Visual.ly is both a tool and community for infographics creators

Visual.ly is a community platform for data visualization and infographics set up in 2011. It allows you both to create infographics and get them shared on social media.

The website is also able to match those commissioning infographics – including brands, companies, and agencies – with its community over more than 35,000 designers.

Canva

Oh, how I love the ease and intuitiveness of Canva. From the very beginning, it asks you a series of simple, colorfully-illustrated questions about what’s brought you to their site. (Today, it’s infographics, but there’s a ton of other stuff you can create there, too.)

Once you’ve let Canva know what you want to do, the site generates several templates you can use as a foundation for your infographic.

Plus, it’s got a library of roughly 1,000,000 images that you can add to your project.

From there, you can edit the text, background image, shapes and other aspects of the infographic to make it your own.

And it’s so easy — here’s a goofy one that I put together on how my dog spends his day:

Venngage

Looking for an easy-to-use tool? Venngage is your best bet!

Venngage is a great tool for creating and publishing infographics because it’s so simple and easy to use.

You can choose from templates, themes, and hundreds of charts and icons as well as upload your images and backgrounds, or customize a theme to suit your brand. You can animate them too!

For infographics, there’s a decent range of templates, each categorized by type — statistical, process, and timeline, to name a few.

Some of the templates are limited to premium members, reflecting Venngage’s four-tiered approach to pricing — free, premium, education, and non-profit. Plus, there are templates available for those latter two categories.

Easel.ly

Easel.ly offers a dozen free templates to start you off

This free web-based infographic tool offers you a dozen free templates to start you off, which are easily customizable.

You get access to a library of things like arrows, shapes, and connector lines, and you can customize the text with a range of fonts, colors, text styles and sizes. The tool also lets you upload your graphics and position them with one touch.

Easel.ly is a no-frills platform that’s comprised of infographics.

You can choose which category you’d like, but it’s not quite as organized as some other sites — the drop-down menu is a bit hidden to the left of the templates.

Still, most of the templates appear to be available for free (more become available with a Pro membership), and they’re fairly easy to edit.

Freepik

As its name suggests, Freepik is a resource for, well, free pictures.

Infographics are just one type, but after performing a search for them, there are plenty of options — most of which are complimentary.

The only drawback? Freepik doesn’t quite allow the same level of customization that some others on this list do.

You can download the images for free, but you’ll need a vector graphics editor to customize them.

Infogram

Like many of its visual peers, Infogram is a resource that helps users create both picturesque charts and infographics.

It’s one of the more “grown-up” sites available for building these images, which might explain why very few of their tools are free — including restricting your work from public consumption.

However, Infogram also has the option of enlisting professional help with infographic design.

So if you’re short on time and have a bit of room in your budget, this route might be the best one for you.

Zanifesto

At the very top of Zanifesto’s website, there’s bold red banner that reads, “Create something.”

When you click on that banner, a list of pricing options appears one of which is free and all of which are reasonable. The only drawback?

It looks like you have to create an account to access any of the resources, even the free ones. Plus, the free option restricts you from being able to upload any custom graphics.

But once you do create a free account, there are plenty of template options and, despite not being able to use your graphics, Zanifesto’s library of icons provides a decent selection.

Google Charts

Oh well, maybe a chart isn’t the same as an infographic. But, given the interesting selection templates made available by Google, I would not exclude it.

There are a few items of value in Google charts. First, we love the selection of charts available.

From animated bubble graphs — like the one above — to clever word trees, the features allow users to bring information to life. (I mean, admit it — adding animation to data always makes it a little less boring.)

One of my favorites, GeoCharts, allows data to be assigned to different regions of a map that appear when hovered over. Check it out.

We’ll admit that some features of Google Charts might be a bit more advanced than the other resources we’ve listed.

But, if you’re ready to step up your visuals game, give it a try.

The bottom line

There’s no shortage of resources when it comes to creating your visuals — charts, reports, and infographics.

And, depending on your budget and needs, they’re a veritable plethora of options available, all of which have their pros, with very few cons.

Look at any industry and its most important technologies were largely shaped by investment from the federal government. Today, however, the challenges are evolving. We’re entering a new era of innovation in which technologies like genomics, nanotechnology, and robotics are going to reshape traditional industries like energy, healthcare, and manufacturing.

What are your go-to resources for creating beautiful infographics? Let us know in the comments.

Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff ’s teamwork, collaboration, and learning? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a teamwork or continuous learning workshop?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of a business. Find him on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

9 Things to Know About Creative Visual Design Content

8 Presenter Mistakes That Are Rarely Made Twice

Know These Great Secrets of Collaboration and Co-Creation

How Good Is Your Learning from Failure?

Like this short blog? Follow Digital Spark Marketing on LinkedIn or add us to your circles for 3-4 short, interesting blogs, stories per week.

Full-service image creators

For a social marketer, the biggest value Canva provides is simplicity: create striking imagery by just dragging and dropping elements into place. No design experience? No problem. Plug text or photos into their ready-made layouts or produce something from scratch.

Much like Canva, BeFunky is a one-stop shop for graphic creation and collages. Choose layouts based on function: social media headers, blogger resources, and small business templates are among the options. Customizations come quickly and easily with the company’s user-friendly interface.

Design assets

Free stock photos

Data visualization

Photo editor/enhancer

Photo overlays

Phonto, the app that allows you to add creative text to images, is a minute marketer’s dream: import an image, add text, style it, and share. Of course, the real art is selecting the right font and impeccably placing your design. The best part? Phonto won’t cost you a dime.

Visual quotes

Photo re-sizer

Bonus: Download a free cheat sheet to quickly find the best image sizes for every social network and learn how you can use Hootsuite to easily add them to any post.

Annotations

Mockups

It is nothing new to hear that using remarkable images for your blog posts is an important part of presenting your work to your viewers. Pictures and images can either make or break a product’s or article’s success. Why is that?

Well, most of us are very visual people and are either drawn in or turned off by certain colors or images that we come in contact with. In fact, we’re trained to be this way thanks to all the media and advertisements that we’ve been visually bombarded with since childhood.

Those programs take time to learn and they cost a boatload of money — both of which many people can’t always swing, especially when they just want to create something here and there.

Why Create Unique Images?

Is there good reasons to create your own images to use in your posts? I mean, sure, they can be a fun little side thing to do after tediously editing your post, but are there benefits?

Absolutely! Here are a few benefits you may not have thought of.

People Like To Look At Something New

It Is A Lot Less Expensive

That means that all you’ll be spending is a bit of time and creativity to create something really cool.

Better For SEO

Queen Google is all about authentic and unique, and anything that falls below that standard is not all that impressive to her. Even though stock and vector photos can be brilliant and appealing to the eye, so many people have jumped on board with using them that they’re no longer unique.

Ready to dive in? Let’s go!

Sourcing Truly Free Images To Create A Unique Image

There are quite a few sites where you can source and download pictures free of charge. However, the ones that I’ll list below are likely ones that you have comes across before.

New Old Stock

Looking for a photo with a vintage feel? How about using authentic, vintage images fro public archives that are free of any known copyright restrictions? New Old Stock has a ton of truly vintage that you could use as part of your image creation.

But I’m not done yet. These sites and the photos on them are merely suggestions to provide a base for your image creation. Simply using them may be fine for some, but I want to show you how you can take these pictures and create something entire unique from them.

StockSnap.io

This is another site where you can go and source beautiful imagery that are free and have no copyright restrictions. The Gallery on the site organizes the photos into certain categories to make finding a type of picture easier. As a side note, they also have videos free of copyright restrictions.

Creating Your Unique Images

Canva

This is probably my favorite online image creating platform. I was lucky enough to stumble across it after it first launched and I’ve been hooked ever since.

You can choose from one of the preset design options like a Twitter or Facebook post that you can use and set that as your featured image for your site or you can set your own custom dimensions and go from there.

You can use this for more than creating a blog post image. You can create Twitter or Facebook headers, design a poster, create a unique Instagram picture and a large infographic image. There are options to upload your own images and icons so that you use your own elements in your design.

Piktochart

The editing options within Piktochart also make it easy to design more than just infographics. There are options on the site to create reports, banners, and presentations. You can also shrink the size of the canvas and create a smaller but stunning blog post image too.

Pic Monkey

Pic Monkey is a free online photo editing and creating tool. The free service lets you edit an existing image or design an entirely new one and it comes with some great features that make it easy to do so.

Crop and resize pixels of an image

Sharpen and adjust exposure

Apply visual effects like Black and White or Sepia Filters

Add fonts, textures, frames, and overlays to images. You can even upload your own overlays or icons to use in the picture.

Google Slides

You can upload your own background and other images, have access to and use all the 400+ Google Fonts and plenty more to help you craft a unique image.

The bottom line

Creating an image from scratch may seem like just another time-consuming and unnecessary task to add to the workload of creating a blog post, however, don’t view it that way.

All the image creating resources listed above take a bit of time to learn, but they’re much easier to use than something like Photoshop and Illustrator; playing around with one for an hour or so will have you on the right path in no time.

There are sure to be plenty of other free options for creating images for your blog posts. Do you have a favorite resource for doing this? Be sure to share in the comments below.

More inspirational stories from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

Spending hours learning how to implement the smallest improvements on your social media performance is my biggest source of frustration. Hands down the biggest for me.

You probably understand how important it is to give your visitors a great reader experience.

And to do that, you need to optimize many areas of your social media as well as your blog.

I love to read, learn, and try new things. Like new apps for my smartphone and iPad. Often, I’ll see something that I want to try, save, and connect with other new apps I am using.

Ideas that come from previously unconnected planes of thought.

There are many apps for workers looking to improve social media performance that can be a big help in this regard. And less wasted time? Yes, very good for that also.

Related: 12 Extraordinary Graphic Design Tools You Should be Using

Ponder for a moment … the iPad, Cloud computing, and Apps. A few years ago, they barely existed. Now they’re an integral part of our lives. That swift journey from nonexistent to indispensable seems to happen a lot these days.

But it gives us unlimited access to improve our learning and utility for things like through apps and idea connection.

This makes you think: What social media apps were you not using two years ago that today you can’t imagine living without today?

Here are my favorite of these very essential apps. They will help you either create content faster or create content that wasn’t possible before.

No doubt you’ve seen explainer videos before. They look as if someone is drawing images on the screen.

In most cases, they aren’t. They use a tool such as VideoScribe instead.

It is one of the coolest tools I’ve seen. It allows you to create different images and then pick a style of hand and pen.

Then, the tool puts all your images together to form a video. But the useful part is that it draws the images for you.

It loads the background first and then moves the hand around to make it look as if it’s drawing the other lines and pieces as they load.

Snov.io is the perfect all-in-one cold outreach automation platform you never realized you needed. With it, organizing your cold email campaign is streamlined to the max.

Snov.io Email Finder will find prospects’ emails on any website or a professional network in seconds – all you have to do is simply add them to the list. An inbuilt email verifier tool checks the emails for validity to boost the delivery rate.

Social media performance … Buffer

Buffer has been one of the first social media marketing tools we have been using on a regular basis and it kind of stuck with us.

Buffer simply is awesome for scheduling tweets. And it has a free version that allows you to schedule up to ten tweets – that will get you far especially when you are just starting out on Twitter.

Buffer can also schedule posts for Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. I rarely use this function, however.

Either there are better ways for me to schedule posts for these networks, or I do not use a scheduling tool for them at all.

But for scheduling on Twitter, Buffer is simply the best there is. Also, take a look at the analytics part of Buffer which is great if you want to test headlines or tweet images.

Another one of those simple design tools is Pablo.

This one is made by the same people behind Buffer. Pablo is extremely simple to use but focuses especially on social media images.

However, there’s no reason why you can’t use these in your blog posts as well.