Entrepreneurs are full of ideas, enthusiasm, grit and tenacity – but what are the two things that entrepreneurs usually don’t have enough of? Time and money.
If that’s the case with you, here’s a tool you need to know about:
PosterMyWall lets everyone create high-quality graphics quickly and affordably—no design talent or deep pockets required. In four easy steps, business owners can have professional marketing materials delivered to their mail or in box.
How Entrepreneurs Are Using PosterMyWall to Drive Business Online
1) Choose a template:
Let’s face it. Using a graphic designer to develop your new company’s logo, letterhead, sales flyers and ads is an expensive and time-consuming process. Depending on your budget, it’s just plain unaffordable.
That doesn’t mean you have to learn know how to use Photoshop or Illustrator or CorelDRAW – or go without. You just need to find an online tool that does the graphic design work for you.
The beauty of PosterMyWall is that it is template-driven. So you don’t have to design anything from scratch (although you can) — you just need to know what you like.
Entrepreneurs can choose from thousands of templates to create awesome business cards, flyers, posters, or ads. Templates are searchable by industry or type of collateral.
The important thing to consider when choosing a template is layout. All other elements of the design can be edited to suit your needs, so focus on a look that expresses your company’s personality.
Let’s say I am going to have a big sale on outdoor clothing at my boys clothing store and I want to put a poster in the window to advertise it. I’m going to search for a “sale” template and select the one I like best.
2) Customize the template:
The next step is to download the template so that you can customize it. Hovering your mouse over the template reveals all the editable fields – which is nearly every field on the template.
It’s important for entrepreneurs to define their brand. Making one-of-a-kind collateral is key to being authentic and recognizable. You don’t want your corporate communications to look like they came off the shelf.
Don’t worry. Even with its template-driven design, the possibilities with PosterMyWall are endless. You can edit text, images, and backgrounds with really cool filters, effects, color gradients and fonts—even upload your own images and fonts.
The intuitive tool makes it really easy and the more you play with it, the more you discover how much it can do. Saving projects to your free PosterMyWall cloud account means you’ll never lose your reference point.
After you establish the fonts, colors and images that define your brand, saving projects is a great way to maintain a consistent look and feel.
When editing colors use the “Choose from design” feature to point to any color on your design and select it as the color for other elements, allowing you to replicate colors throughout a marketing piece exactly. So the blue in your logo is exactly the same blue that is in your headline.
You have two brand colors? No problem! You can easily introduce a gradient background that adds amazing visual interest by transitioning between the two.
It’s also easy to incorporate photos with PosterMyWall, either as backgrounds or within the poster.
You get lots and lots of choices here. You can upload your own photos or choose from thousands of stock images from four image libraries—Getty Images, Pixaboy, Flickr or PosterMyWall’s own image library.
Getty images cost $2 extra but all the other images are free. Finding the right image is fast and easy with a searchable library that displays image choices as large icons.
Leave yourself a little extra time when you use images because you will want to use it to play with the many effects included in the PosterMyWall tool. Besides the usual cropping and rotating, you can vary the opacity of the image with a slider bar, fading it if you just want it to convey a subliminal message.
You can change any image to either black and white or sepia – or invert it for an edgy artistic effect. The “Glow” filter makes images really pop off the page. Edge effects run the gambit from various shapes to modern edge effects like “scratched” and “torn paper.”
Here’s a before and after image of a shirt. This image was a free download from Pixaboy that I inverted, added strong glow and the scratched edge. This took less than one minute. Seriously easy.
One of my favorite image editing features is MASK. So powerful! You can upload your own image and then just pull out one element.
It takes almost no practice to master this technique, but it looks like something only a highly paid graphic designer would do. Just click around the edge of the object you want to pull out of the image.
You can enlarge the image and place the cut long very precisely along the border. Click on MASK and voila! You can pull any object into your graphic design.
Another great feature is the ability to share projects among team members. With one click you can share a finished project for team review—or you can work collaboratively on a project with team members.
In my case, I want to add an image of a little boy to my poster, so I upload my image and then use the MASK editor to select just the part of my image that I want – the little boy who is pointing.
I then edit the text, move text boxes around on the poster, remove the borders and save my design.
Here is a sampling of other customizable templates for realtors, restaurants, bars, retail stores, bands, events…you name it!
3) Re-size for print and social media:
Re-sizing your finished template allows you to create an entire set of marketing pieces, including posters, flyers, banners, and business cards from a single design.
While printed materials continue to be one of the most effective ways for entrepreneurs to reach new audiences, if you’re not using PosterMyWall to build a social following, you’re missing out.
Again, with just one click, you can resize your design to create a Facebook ad, a Pinterest Graphic, or a digital leaderboard. If the pre-set sizes for posting on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and Etsy aren’t enough, you can customize your design to any size – in pixels, inches or millimeters.
Sharing to social media sites is just as easy. A drop down menu from the SHARE icon, lets you post directly to your Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter or email account. You can also grab the link to share manually or grab the html code so you can embed the image in your blog (you know you MUST have a blog, right??).
BONUS: PosterMyWall social media graphics are free!
You can re-size your templates to create social media posts for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter — and even create online advertising in the most effective sizes — rectangles , leaderboard, and wide skyscraper.
4) Download or print:
As much as people claim that it is a paperless world, at some point you are going to need printed collateral to get yourself in front of your potential customers.
With PosterMyWall you can download a high resolution file and print locally. The turn around time is as fast as your local print shop can do it, allowing entrepreneurs using PosterMyWall to design, download and print promotional flyers or posters in just a few hours.
With that kind of flexibility, you can turn on a dime to take advantage of the changing business landscape to cash in on an unexpected opportunity.
For small businesses without a tight timeline or local printer, PosterMyWall can deliver professionally printed materials straight to your mailbox.
As soon as I re-size my design, a pop-up window lets me share or download it. I can purchase a high quality jpg or pdf for just $2.99, or share socially for free!
Whether you are an established business or just starting out, you should be focused on growing your business. Building brand awareness, promoting special deals, cultivating a social media following are all part of the 21st century business landscape.
PosterMyWall is the one simple, online tool can help you do it all.
