AMY PORTERFIELD: Hey there, Amy Porterfield here and welcome to another episode of The Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m so glad you tuned in so thanks for being here. I’m a little bit stressed because we are just weeks away from my son, Cade, getting out of school for summer break and we have planned zero sports camps for him. It has just kind of gotten away from us. I don’t even know how summer is already here. So now my biggest fear is, I work from home so many of you probably can relate, having your kids home for the summertime is a little bit stressful, even when you’ve got just one like me. Believe me, if you’ve got more than one I know it’s more stressful than my situation. I totally get that.
But here is what I’m stressed out about, I don’t want Cade sitting in front of the computer all day playing computer games, which he loves to do. So, if I can keep him occupied with a few sports camps then I’m good to go and I won’t feel like a terrible mother who lets her kid sit in front of the computer for ten hours a day during the summer. That’s not okay, right?
So I’d better get cracking on those sports camps and maybe some of you can relate because summer for many of us is right around the corner.
Let me get to the point here, today we are talking about visual content. Specifically, visual content to drive more traffic, to drive more leads, and to drive more sales. Because I’m not the expert in visual content I have brought on an expert. Her name is Donna Moritz. Donna is a good friend of mine. We go back to about 2012 when she was in my very first Profit Lab course. She is my #1 alumni from that very first course and I’ve stayed in touch with her ever since and have watched her build a wildly successful business.
Her business is primarily around visual social media and content strategy. She is featured all over the web with Entrepreneur Online, Social Media Examiner, Forbes, and she has an amazing blog, SociallySorted.com.au. This blog has had many awards. She was the business category winner of the 2015 Best Australian Blog competition. I forgot to mention that Donna is from Queensland, Australia. So, all of you Aussies out there, you’ve got a friend coming on soon.
Her blog was also listed as a Top 10 Social Media Blog for Social Media Examiner in 2015. That is a very prestigious award to get. Smart Company named Donna’s blog as one of the Top 10 Business Blogs in 2015. How cool is that! You have definitely got to check out her blog, SociallySorted.com.au.
Before we get into more specifics about Donna and her visual content strategy that she is going to share with us today, I want to let you know that this podcast episode is brought to you by Lead Pages.
You likely already know that I am a huge fan of all things Lead Pages. I use Lead Pages for my opt-in pages, for my pop-up boxes on my website, for my sales pages, my webinar replay pages, my thank-you pages, all of that is through my favorite tool, Lead Pages.
If you want to see how to use Lead Pages and really have a walk through of the different types of templates that you can use to build your own list-building strategy yo u d e fi n i t e l y h a ve t o c h e c k o u t m y l a t e s t we b i n a r a t http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/newleads and you can get all of the details there. It’s a great training and it’s totally free. You can sign up to check it out.
Back to today’s show all about visual content. One of the cool things about the show notes for this episode is that I am going to add a lot of imagery. I am going to actually bring a lot of the examples that we talk that about here on the show today over to my talk notes. The show notes are at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/61 so you can get all of the show notes over there.
I won’t make you wait any longer, let’s go ahead and bring on my Aussie friend, Donna Moritz.
Amy: Donna, thanks so much for being here today. I really appreciate it.
Donna: I’m so excited. It’s always great to chat with you.
Amy: So you were recently on the show just for a split minute because I wanted you to jump on and share your story about SlideShare. But I teased the audience and said you would be coming back. Now you have a full episode to talk all about visual content. I think this is a topic that is so very valuable.
But before we get there and jump in I want you to share your backstory. When I had you on the show for that quick minute you didn’t get to share your backstory and it’s interesting. So, tell me a little bit about that.
Donna: Thanks. Firstly, I feel very blessed and honored to be on here twice. I feel like I’m taking an extra piece of cake.
Amy: I love it!
Donna: If anyone hasn’t guessed, I’m from Australia and I know Amy has mentioned that. But I started out as a young teenager deciding what to do in life and I wanted to be either a designer or to help people. I ended up after an exchange program to Canada deciding to go down the safe job route and be a speech therapist. That was great and I did it for ten years.
I was always very creative and I had never really done the designer thing. So I ended up kind of segueing into a business with a friend of mine and we started a recruitment agency to send people to the UK to work. I had traveled to the UK as a speech therapist and had an amazing time. We started the recruitment agency with no money, no experience, and really not any marketing experience either other than what I had learned as a speechy.
I had a real crash course in marketing and it was before social media. But if I look back now, I only realized this a while ago, we would travel around the country and do presentations at universities, we would use phone, email, a website that was an early version of a blog that had kind of a travel blog on it. We would help people get ready for working holidays. We used ninja marketing. We had to go up against big agencies and basically killed everybody with love.
Amy: Fantastic!
Donna: We made everybody feel so loved, welcome and ready for their trip. While everybody else was getting people ready for work we were getting them ready for a working holiday and that was our point of difference. I learned very quickly to use, not only visual content in print media and things like that, but also how to be social before we had any social media.
We had to piece it all together. We had an old clunky CRM that we put together to keep track of people and I learned a lot. Then I came back and had babies and things like that. Then it kind of segued into social media after we sold our agency. Basically, the bottom fell out of the UK market and I had my first success but failure. I then started to kind of apply all of the things I had learned in that and another brick and mortar business I had with my husband and really fell in love with social media.
I guess I had already been kind of doing that kind of marketing, relationship marketing, and I started a blog because a friend told me to. The blog kind of started to take off but I really noticed that the articles on the blog that were really popular were the ones about visual content when Pintrest was starting to become popular. Also the blogs about how to use images and create visual content for your blog were popular back in the days when PicMonkey was new as a tool.
I really just started to resonate with visual content. People were liking it and then I met you and was one of your first Profit Lab members and you asked me to do a guest post.
Amy: That’s right.
Donna: I remember thinking it was your first guest post on your blog and it was like I had been handed a baby. I went a little bit over the top and did a blog post that ended up being a bit of an epic about how to use Pintrest for business. And, just because it’s not enough work to do that I thought I could do an infographic.
Amy: This is Donna’s style. You all are in for a treat today because when we get into the content Donna delivers way more than most people in terms of free content. So this is a perfect example. She literally got with a designer and designed an entire infographic all about Pintrest and how to optimize your pins and all that good stuff with Pintrest. It really caught on like wildfire off my blog post. I was very lucky.
Donna: Yes. It was funny because at the time infographics were very popular but they were like this: Someone takes a really big amount of data and then turns it into a beautiful picture with amazing design. You had amazing pieces of design that were great to look at but not really something that people would retain.
People would pin it to a board on Pintrest and never really look at it again. I wanted something that people would use. So that was the start of my journey into infographics that were helpful.
We just did a summary of the blog post. It was nothing special but it was useful and it was bright and fun and it still gets pinned all the time.
Amy: I’ll link to it in the show notes so you guys can see exactly what she’s talking about. It is the ultimate guest blog post (http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/2012/06/ the-10-commandments-of-using-pinterest-for-business/) that someone would ever do for me. It was amazing.
Donna: We’ve actually revamped the blog post but I think the infographic needs a makeover now.
Amy: Probably. I’m still going to link to it. It’s a little old but I just want to show you guys where this all started. It is awesome stuff. From there, would you say your main focus is on visual content?
Donna: Yes, from there, once I saw that happen, it was like watching it live and saying, “Wow, this piece of content is driving traffic to Amy’s blog post.” I think you were running a webinar with Melanie Duncan at the time so you were smart and had an opt in at the bottom and it all worked perfectly.
I started to think of how this would work in other situations. I started to do more infographics and more posts about visual content. Essentially, I pivoted my blog. I remember listening to Darren Rowse speak. He said, “When you see a spark and something that really resonates with you and your readers you should just fan the flame a little bit and follow it.”
That’s what I did. So my whole blog pivoted to be about visual social media and content strategy, essentially.
Amy: Awesome. So, let’s talk about visual content. Why do you think it’s getting so much air play? Why is visual content just so popular right now?
Donna: I think you can go back to caveman days. We have always been drawing on walls. We are hardwired to connect emotionally with visual content. We do it from the moment we are babies. We react to visuals and faces. If you put aside video at the moment, if you want to just talk about visuals themselves like images and pictures, we process them very quickly. It is faster than text, video, and audio. We can make a really quick decision about whether we are going to engage with something.
I have a good buddy, Joshua Parkinson, who founded Post Planner. He says you need to get people to stop the scroll. I think that’s a really great term. There’s so much noise on the newsfeeds that it’s like the Grand Prix, vroom!
Amy: That’s so true.
Donna: You need to stop it to sort of even see if you are going to engage with something. If it’s not catching your eye or resonating with you or easily processed and is really snackable then you will just let it pass on by. I think in that sense visual content is a great way for people to do that.
It also kind of acts as a time machine or a doorway so when someone clicks on a piece of content they can be transported to any other social platform or place or website on the internet because people are clicking through and moving from one platform to another.
I think it’s become so popular that every platform has become visual. Even Twitter is visual now with Twitter cards and images to show up. LinkedIn owns SlideShare so that is visual. All of the platforms are visual and tweets with images get retweeted twice as often. There are so many stats to show that visuals are mind-blowingly popular and they work.
Amy: Now tell me this though, what types of visual content are out there. I think there are a lot of different options here so talk to me about that.
Donna: Sure. I recently started to think about that because people would get overwhelmed where to jump in. I really like to think about three levels. You have your shareables which are the really easy-to-create, easy-to-share individual images that would be on Facebook and Pintrest and Instagram. These are sort of your funny photos, behind-the-scenes photos, images you create with quotes and tips. They are sort of how-to images. They are really a good jumping off point.
Then you can move forward a bit and do what I call step-by-step. These might take a little more effort but they bring more return as far as driving traffic and getting results. This is sort of like your check lists or your how-to images with photos and mini infographics, things like tutorials. They work really well on Pintrest and get shared a lot.
The third level, which is sort of where you really want to step up to if you’ve been doing some visual content or you have a big blog post or a launch or something, these are the showpieces. These take a bit more investment of time and money and they bring a lot more traffic. These are infographics, short videos.
Amy: How about SlideShare?
Donna: Definitely SlideShare.
Amy: What I’m going to do, if you’re listening right now. Obviously, you are listening or how would you be hearing from us. I’m going to put these three different types on the show notes. Donna, didn’t you just write a blog about these as well?
Donna: Yes! It will be going live just a couple of days before this goes live. It is titled:
Nine Ways to Up-Level Your Visual Content.
Amy: Perfect. I am going to link to Donna’s recent blog post that will talk about what she basically laid out. I am also going to show you three examples that Donna has created in each of these categories. Would you say that you are extremely creative?
Here’s what’s not fair, I don’t have a creative bone in my body. Are you telling us…
Donna: You do.
Amy: I don’t. Are you telling us that to do this stuff you have to be really creative?
Donna: This is the thing, I said I wanted to be a designer but I never ended up being a designer. The tools we have available now are amazing. It means that anyone can be creative. There are tools like Canva, and we can get to those in a moment, but there are tools available to let anyone create visual content, even a SlideShare or infographic or individual images, it’s quite amazing.
Amy: Even if you don’t necessarily have a designer’s eye like I don’t?
Donna: There are different levels at which you can jump in. You can jump in all gung ho and do them from scratch with a template or with a tool. You can actually use templates and not have to be too creative.
Amy: I like the template idea. We’ll talk about tools.
Donna: You can use your designer and work with them. You can say, “Hey, can you create me a template.” Then you can add text overlay on top of that.
Amy: Oooh, I like that.
Donna: You can go full blown and actually get it outsourced completely.
Amy: So there are some options there. We’ve got our three visual types. Again, http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/61 will have the show notes and these show notes will be packed with a lot of great examples of images as well as links to great information.
The next question I have for you is, what are the essential elements of a really great visual? What makes a visual fantastic when used on social media?
Donna: That’s a great question. If you strip it back and don’t think about design at all, the two things that work time and time again are either that it helps in some way or it inspires in some way or evokes emotion or anything in that inspiring category. Those two things work best. Notice how nobody will come back to an infographic that is not helpful to them.
Even with images, it needs to be eye catching. You need to add some sort of context. An image of a lady standing on the beach with her arms outstretched won’t really mean anything on Pintrest if it is separated from a blog post. But if it has a blog title of Nine Yoga Techniques You’ve Never Heard Of overlaid on top then people know immediately that it will be about yoga or meditation or whatever it’s about. Adding context is useful as well as some sort of call to action.
The call to action can be on the image itself, on the actual shareable image or at the bottom of an infographic, or a call to action in a slide deck. Or it can be in the description around the image. But we tend to go first to the image and then to the description. So if you can give some sort of call to action on the actual image without being over the top then it’s worth it.
Making sure the image is the right size and style for the platform is important. You have probably heard people like Gary Vaynerchuk talk about the importance of creating native visual content and making sure it suits the platform you are on. It is the type of content people would normally share, not marketing content, and the right size.
Say you are creating an image, one size does not necessarily fit all but square might work for Instagram and Facebook. Landscape works for Facebook and Twitter. Just thinking about some of those elements will help to make a great visual.
Amy: I’m going to put you on the spot here. This right size thing can really stress people out. Do you know of or could we maybe find some resources out there that tell you exactly the size you should do for a Facebook post so that it doesn’t get cut off on the Facebook page or a Twitter image or Instagram, or whatever.
Donna: What I will do is give you a blog post about that.
Amy: Perfect.
Donna: We will put that in the show notes. Firstly, one-size-fits all is a wonderful concept but it doesn’t necessarily work.
Amy: No, it doesn’t.
Donna: But there are some tricks. Firstly, Canva is bringing out a new level of their tool. The tool is found at Canva.com. Most of your listeners have probably heard of Canva by now. But they are bringing out a pro account where you can take a design and then hit resize and resize it.
Amy: What? Finally!
Donna: I am using it right now. It’s in Beta. It’s amazing.
Amy: So I basically create an image for, let’s say Facebook, and then I click to resize for Instagram.
Donna: Yes. You would save a copy if you still want to keep the original. You hit resize and it will bring up the whole image. You know, in Instagram some of the fonts and
the photo may have moved but you just have to tweak it a little bit. It takes literally a minute or so to fix it up.
Amy: Great. So that is hopefully going to be out fairly soon if it’s in Beta.
Donna: Yes, it’s in Beta. I think there will be a small fee for that level of account but I know from what I’ve heard it isn’t going to be much and I think it is definitely worth it. The other thing you can do is think about how you are designing your images.
Rebekah Radice is great. I will give you a link to one of her blog posts. She has a square-shaped image as her blog header. She is really clever. When she designs that image she puts most of the text in the middle section so if you share that square image to Twitter the part that shows up on Twitter is the most important part. She is very, very clever.
Amy: That is cool.
Donna: You can do some of those things with your images. If there are two platforms you are using a lot, say you are really using your blog and Twitter, then you can design your images to suit both. The other thing you can do is just create images based on where you are sharing most of your content. Don’t try to do an image that goes for every platform but just pick the two or three that you are focusing on.
Amy: I love that. I think that is the smartest way to go. And keep it simple which is what most of us need to do so we aren’t spending all day, or hours even, on these images.
Here’s the deal, I’ve heard you talk about the concept of driving traffic with visual content. I want to talk about how that works but I also want to tell everybody that I did a podcast episode (#56). The podcast episode was How to Create Content to Attract Your Target Market. This was something my audience had asked for so we went over a lot of content ideas.
That’s when I brought Donna on as a guest and she shared some strategies around SlideShare. They were so good. SlideShare is just so awesome in terms of how Donna uses it. But, since we went into detail already, I want you to check out Episode #56 if you haven’t already, because there are some really cool content strategies using images that Donna talked about.
Coming back here, talk to me about how you use visual images to drive traffic.
Donna: Okay, this is something I am really excited about. Since that infographic went crazy I’ve seen it happen again and again. I really think about the fact that everybody is so focused on likes and comments and reach. We often forget about what happens after the piece of content is put in front of their eyeballs.
Reach is important but if people don’t take action on it then it’s really not worth anything. I like likes and comments but I really want click throughs and shares. When you have a piece of visual content and it’s amazing people want to do one of two things. Of course, they do want to like and comment. But they want to click through on it to find more information because they think it’s amazing already and are curious about where it comes from and they also want to share it.
Those two things are the holy grail as far as I’m concerned when it comes to visual content. The thing about driving traffic, like I said before, visual content is a doorway. It’s like a time machine.
If you look at a tweet it might have a lifespan of minutes or hours, sometimes days, with resharing. A Facebook post might have a lifespan of days or maybe a week. Or someone might find it later on and bring it back up into the newsfeed. But a piece of visual content can show up months or years later.
If you do a search on your site and what’s being shared from amyporterfield.com from your website to Pintrest, that infographic from almost three years ago is still showing up daily. These types of content show up more than a tweet or Facebook post will. They have longevity.
I often hear Peg Fitzpatrick talk about how it has such longevity. It’s so true. In terms of driving traffic if you can have a good call to action on a piece of visual content that is getting eyeballs on it then the potential is exponential. It is quite amazing how much traffic it can drive so I have used it to drive traffic to webinar signups, from infographics or slide decks which we talked about in the other interview. You can use shareable images to create buzz and then throw in some call to action images on any platform: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
If you have a call to action in either the description or your profile link on the image you can really start to drive people through. I have five steps. Do you want to hear how they work?
Amy: Yeah, tell me.
Donna: So this works perfectly with something like Amy’s program or even her podcast where she is always talking about the steps of taking someone from being a fan through to a customer. Everyone will have some kind of marketing plan in place, hopefully, especially if they have done your programs.
But this works in perfectly with your existing marketing plan. You have a piece of visual content and then you need to have some sort of call to action on it either in the description or on the piece of content. That will then drive to somewhere. You have that mapped out and it will usually be some sort of landing content. That can be from an image or SlideShare to a blog post. It can be to a landing page like a Lead Page landing page.
Amy: It could be like an image where on the image you are talking about a lead magnet like a free guide or whatever.
Donna: If it’s an infographic I keep that pretty subtle at the bottom. But with a slide show you can be a bit more obvious about it and put it in a couple of times in the middle and at the end.
Amy: Or is this also just a post you would put on Facebook?
Donna: It can be anything. Once you get the concept of it then it’s just a matter of plugging in the pieces. It can be an image that you tweet. For me it might be an image promoting a webinar. You post other tweets as well but you have your promotional tweets. You might have an image to promote a three-part video series or a blog post. Then that blog post might be where you get people to sign up to be a subscriber or to sign up for a webinar. Or it could be a Facebook post driving people through to a Lead Pages landing page. Or it could be a slide deck driving people through to your opt-in form on your website or it could be to a product sales page if you really wanted to send them directly there.
It’s that piece of visual content, then a call to action, and then some sort of warm landing content. From there you obviously have a goal and that is to have someone sign up for your webinar, subscribe to your list, or whatever. Then, that should basically have them into whatever our current followup program is where you are providing value, either providing what you are offering or providing more value in terms of email marketing. That should hopefully make sense.
Amy: Just to reiterate really fast, you are creating a piece of visual content and adding a call to action inside that visual content. Is that right?
Donna: It is either on the visual content, depending on the size, or in the description.
Amy: So if it’s a Facebook post it may be at the top of the post where you have your call to action and then you have your visual content, which is an image. You are driving somewhere whether it is to a blog post or a webinar opt-in page or your opt-in page for your free PDF.
Whatever it is, you are driving them somewhere to get more information and then hopefully take action, which is Step #4, the goal, sign up, read the blog, opt in to something great, whatever it might be. Then #5 is where you have hopefully gotten them to do something and, in many cases how I do it, you have gotten them to opt in to something and now you are adding value and following up through email marketing.
Donna: Yes.
Amy: Perfect. Got you.
Donna: Someone could take this and plug it in to what they are learning from you or what they already have established. It’s like an extra layer. It is kind of like super charging your existing marketing. Anyone can start using visuals to really add an extra layer. It’s almost like a slip stream effect. You are bringing people towards the funnel, essentially.
Amy: Perfect. I like to see it in action so that makes sense. Donna, I want to swing back a little bit. We already talked about one tool that you talk about a lot and I’ve brought into a lot of my podcast episodes. That is Canva. It is a desktop tool to create images. Another one you mentioned was PicMonkey.
Both desktop tools help you create images. Can you kind of just shed some light there because I am going to ask you about some other tools you use as well.
Donna: Sure. I am very proud of Canva. It’s not my company but I wish it was.
Amy: You would think it was your company you love it so much.
Donna: They recently did what number signup you are on Canva and I think I was #313 out of 2 ½ million. I was very early, pre Beta playing with it. I like watching it grow. But Melanie Perkins and Cliff, her partner, have done an amazing thing. Canva is a DIY design tool.
It was designed to help people have some of the functionality of some of the programs like Photoshop but without needing to be a designer. They have thousands of templates. The big news is they have just released an infographic template, which is amazing.
I used it the other day to create an infographic. It literally took me about 30 minutes. It looks pretty good (I hope). They now have that in there but there are also all sorts of templates from social media templates, PDFs, posters, everything you can imagine. There are three levels you can go in at with Canva.
One level is to design using their templates. You don’t have to do much tweaking, just add colors and fonts and things or leave them as is. That’s really easy. Or you can get quite custom with it and start using their tools really like a designer.
They have an amazing blog called the Canva Design School. It is a mix of their blog and design tutorials. When you go in and do these tutorials they literally take a couple of minutes. It teaches you how to do something really cool that you have always wondered how “they” do that like blurring a background image or something like that. You are actually doing it in Canva so it is hands-on tutorials.
Amy: It’s so amazing. I have done it. This is for those that struggle with creativity like me. It is a great tool. If you are not really techy this is also great. It is Canva’s design school and it is totally free.
Like Donna said, and I want to point this out, while you are learning you are actually doing. I don’t really understand how brilliant they are in terms of how that works but it is so very cool. You can follow along step by step and create some awesome things.
Donna: Yes, it’s amazing. If you get stuck there is a video that is literally 30 seconds and it is actually them just showing you how to do it. It’s really cool. I love doing them.
They are great. You can do that and they are actually now bringing out a team version which I am testing out at the moment. It’s amazing.
I can work with my virtual assistant, my content manager, who I just started a couple of weeks ago and she can help me create images and we can share them within Canva and I can edit them quickly. It’s amazing. So it is great for teams as well. That’s Canva.
Amy: Let’s talk about PicMonkey, the other tool. We just don’t use it as much.
Donna: I do still use PicMonkey.
Amy: You do?
Donna: Yeah. It’s a photo-editing tool and they have amazing layouts and themes. If you are doing something for Halloween or Thanksgiving, they have a cartoon superheroes theme, you can do some really cool things with that. They’ve got really good filters and fonts and things like that.
You can actually import your brand fonts. It picks up the brand fonts on your computer. So if you want an image with a specific font on it you can do that. Canva doesn’t have that yet. They probably will but that’s a really cool tool. So I really use both a bit. And it’s great for resizing and things like that.
Amy: Great. So, how about mobile tools?
Donna: A lot of visual content tools tend to come out on iPhone first. I apologize to the Android users but I do have one. The two that I do use mostly are Word Swag. It is a typography tool. You plug in your quote or whatever you want to say.
You can use images of your own and they have an image bank from Pixabay. You then change around the layouts and it will shuffle through a whole loop of layouts that look like designers have done them. They are amazing. That is on a mobile and only on iPhone at the moment but hopefully it will be available on Android at some point and iPad as well.
Another website Over is a great little tool for doing text overlays on images as well. It is available on Android and iPhone. There is another one called Quick. It is an entry- level version of Over as well. It is pretty cool too. Those are three I use.
Amy: How about to create slide decks like what you did for SlideShare. I will put an example in the show notes and will definitely show you how Donna has used SlideShare. But, what do you do for that?
Donna: For SlideShare I have actually used Canva’s slide deck template because it’s really simple and easy to use. You can do up to 30 slides. When you save it as a PDF then you can go in and edit your PDF and add in any calls to action with links so be sure to do that. You can link to anything. You can’t do it for the first three slides and I think that’s a fair call.
Amy: Yeah, that’s great.
Donna: After that I usually put one in the middle and one at the end. There is also another great tool called Haiku Deck. They have some really cool templates as well. They were designing a new version of their product, which will be very cool if it works. Apparently it has artificial intelligence so you can take any notes or information and it will create a slide deck. I don’t know how that is going to work but it sounds amazing.
Amy: Awesome. But I think it is so cool that Canva actually has a template that you can use to create a slide deck. I think that’s awesome. Then, talk to me about short video. You know a lot about short video and how to use images. I also want you to talk a little bit about Periscope. What is that all about?
Donna: To be honest, I haven’t gotten into Periscope a lot. But it is basically live streaming. It has become really popular so I think it is definitely worth people checking that out. It is hooked up with Twitter. It is just another way for people to add in a different level of visual content to their instructing.
Amy: Okay, this is where I have to interrupt you real fast. When you talk about visual content you are not always talking about just images. Isn’t Periscope where you are literally seeing the person?
Donna: You are. People can follow and engage and it has become a really popular medium. It is something I am starting to play with more now. There are a whole bunch of different ways you can look at short videos.
There is straight short video. If you upload it to Facebook, and I know you have talked about this on your podcasts, it is amazing. Facebook is really pushing video that is uploaded natively. I know you have mentioned it before. You get amazing views versus uploading a YouTube video.
You can still do longer form video but people’s attention spans are shortened nowadays. I am talking about the short one-minute-or-less videos or those on Instagram where it is 15 seconds. You can do amazing things in 15 seconds. Whether it is just giving a quick tip or showing something or maybe you can take people on a tour by actually speeding up your video you can use a tool called Hyperlapse, an Instagram tool where you might take a minute or two of footage but you can speed it up so that you get that funny running around kind of speed.
You can also slow it down and do cool things too. I don’t know if you are familiar with the Wallace and Gromit stop-motion animation. That has come a long way and now there is an app called the Stop Motion app. I have started playing with that to do some short Instagram videos where you are just taking photos and moving something around. It just does that little funny stop-motion effect. That can be really cool for a really short Instagram video. It is an app you can get on your iPhone.
Amy: There are so many cool tools.
Donna: There are so many things. There is another one called Video Enhance where you can do editing on your actual mobile. I know you have done an episode recently on mobile apps.
Admittedly, I played around with Meerkat when it first came out and I have Periscope. I tend to think I will probably be going more with Periscope because of the fact that it is linked up with Twitter. But I know a lot of people in my community that are using it and loving it and the live streaming.
Amy: Yes. It’s a really cool tool.
Donna: People are using it a lot at events. I’ve seen some of the speakers using it before and after their presentations, interviewing people. It’s getting a lot of traction. It is sort of a short, in-the-moment capturing life’s moments. And that is what Instagram is about. That is what people are really gravitating towards so definitely check it out.
Amy: Okay, cool. So those are some of the tools. Again, I will put those on the show notes at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/61.
Before we wrap up, my last final question to you is: What are some mistakes that we should avoid when we are creating visual content?
Donna: One of the first things is to not be thinking about any sort of strategy. Even if you are creating the shareables that you are posting on Facebook or Instagram, just start with a simple strategy. It might just be to get consistent. One image a day can bring amazing results.
I know someone that had a travel business that was going under. He started to post one image a day on Instagram. Now he is the top tour on TripAdvisor for Australia, for the entire country!
Amy: That’s cool.
Donna: I’ve seen small business post consistently one image a day, one original image, just a quote, not even their own quote, with less than 1,000 fans on Facebook. This is one of my clients. We had images consistently getting shared 70 or 80 times.
Amy: So good.
Donna: Yes, and that is just being consistent. Let me tell you something, people have a hit list. Do you have a hit list? A nice one?
Amy: What do you mean?
Donna: You have one, I know you have it even if it’s not written down. A hit list is a list of pages and profiles and people you go to in order to share content from.
Amy: Yes, yes, I do.
Donna: You know they are good for it. You know they put out quality content. So these pages that are putting out even just a single image everyday, even if it’s just an obscure business, other pages that are looking for that type of content will come there daily. Some of them even come to the page and just share that content out.
Amy: I just talked about consistency in the episode before this and how very valuable that is. That consistency plays into your visual content as well. I am glad you brought that up.
Donna: If you batch your images you can do that easily. Do a series of quotes or tips and do just one a day. Just start with that. The other thing is to just try to avoid not thinking about driving traffic. Always just be thinking about where you want people to go.
It might be that you just want people to engage to start with in order to build up your reach and engagement. I teach two things. One is the strategy about how to drive traffic and how to take your visual content to another level. But it is also how to create that visual content in the first place because there are so many programs and people saying to be on Facebook and Pintrest and Instagram. But then they are there and they don’t have any content to share that is original.
Amy: That reminds me. Donna, you have created a really cool freebie for this episode. As you all know, if you follow my podcasts, every single episode has a free giveaway of some sort. When I have a fantastic guest on that creates amazing free content I always ask that guest if they would do the free PDF.
Thankfully, Donna said yes. As I mentioned earlier, her free content is the kind of content that you say, “Oh my gosh, I should be paying for this.”
Donna, I know you created something really cool. You can all get it at http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/images. It is a three-part video series where you get really specific on the step-by-step in terms of how to create images. Am I right?
Donna: Yes. We go deep, well not deep but it is three videos. The first is about getting a Facebook image strategy. We then look at tools that you can use and then some myths and mistakes about creating visual content. It does include a couple of PDFs like planning documents that you can use. But it is very, very step by step. People will come away with a visual content strategy even if it is a basic one and just getting shareables up on a platform of their choice. That will usually be Facebook.
It is great. It is a lot of the content that I teach in my main program. I have a program, Create Traffic Driving Images, where we teach all sorts of different things about creating visual content that you can share. But this video training covers a lot and they will get a lot out of it.
Amy: Great. And it’s free and that’s always fun. Again, it’s http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/images to get your hands on the freebie for this episode.
Donna, I want to thank you so very much for being on the show. I really appreciate it.
Donna: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.
Amy: You always have such awesome insights and tips and strategies. I also wanted to share with all of you that Donna’s blog is fantastic. I mentioned in the intro that she has won awards for this amazing blog. You can check it out at http:// www.sociallysorted.com.au. I will link to it in the show notes as well but her blog is something that you definitely want to check out and probably share some of those blog posts with some of your own audiences. It gets tons of traffic and you will love what you find there.
Again, thank you so much for being here Donna. I hope you all have a wonderful day. Bye for now.
