A content management system (CMS) is not just about keeping track of what needs to get done but also ensuring that everything is streamlined, from ideation to keeping track of your content to publishing and keeping track of your data. In addition, it’s about finding a system that you can easily build on and a system that will make the life of your team easier.

What is a Content Management System?

Before diving into different tools, it’s important to understand what a content management system is. A CMS is essentially a process or a platform that helps you plan, organize, create, and publish content. Some of these systems also sometimes include places to store data such as analytics from posts that have performed well in the past.

CMS’s can be used for content from blog posts to social media content, newsletters, or even product descriptions. A good system lets you and your team see what content needs to be created, track progress, and easily find older content when you need it.

A really effective content management system will usually include a place to create a content inventory. This allows brands and creators to visualize how much they have to work with.

For a team, a CMS should allow for collaboration, feedback, and streamlined communication, helping everyone stay on the same page.

Why You Need a Content Management System

If you are an entrepreneur and you manage your own marketing, it’s possible that you could get by without having a concrete system in place. If you are good at following deadlines and creating to-do lists, you could work without one. With that being said, having a system from the start, even if you make any changes to it along the way, will save you time in the long run.

You’ll get to a point in your business where you have created a lot of content, and with no real system in place, you won’t know what’s worked well in the past; you also won’t know how much you have to work with.

It’s better to start early and customize your system as you grow than trying to organize everything you have once you have grown and are in a place where you feel disorganized.

Choosing the Right Tool

There are so many project management and content management tools out there. While most interfaces look different, once you play around with many of them, you’ll be able to identify the features that align with your needs. Below, we’ll review a few great options.

Asana

Asana is great if you need a tool that allows you to assign tasks, set deadlines, and track progress. It’s highly customizable and works well for teams that like to break tasks down into smaller steps. You can create project boards that show what stage different pieces of content are at, whether they’re being drafted, in review, or ready to be published.

Trello

Trello uses a board and card-based system to organize content. Each card can represent a piece of content, such as a blog post, with different lists to track the content’s progress. It’s simple to use and visually intuitive, which makes it great for beginners or small teams. Trello also allows you to add checklists, labels, and attachments to keep everything in one place. Trello is a great option for anyone new to content or project management.

Notion

Notion is more flexible and allows you to customize your workspace to fit your needs. You can create databases, link documents, and design your own workflow. It’s perfect for teams who like to organize everything in one place, from content ideas to meeting notes. Notion is a great all-in-one tool, offering more freedom to design a system that really fits your needs.

Another thing that’s great about Notion is that you can literally build your own database from scratch and use it as a template. That way, if your needs change in the future, you have a base template to work with that you can easily customize.

Google Workspace

There a lot of value in simplicity. If you’re already using Google Docs and Sheets for content creation, Google Workspace offers a seamless way to manage content. You can create shared folders for team members to access, edit, and store documents. While it may not have some of the same capabilities that Asana, Trello, or Notion would offer, if you are already using some of Google’s tools, it’s a great place to get started.

Keeping Your System Running Smoothly

When you find the perfect content management system for you and your team, you’ll want to create SOPs (standard operation procedures) to help your team make the most of these tools. It’s important to be open to feedback, and if your team gives you suggestions on how to improve certain workflows, remember that they are the ones using these tools and processes.

While it can be tempting to try everything new and change tools because something new and exciting is on the market, remember that it’s ok to stick to what works, especially if it’s been proven effective for you.

The post How to Find a Content Management System That Works For You appeared first on Stencil.

Designing an amazing cover/header for your social media brand (or personal) page can be a bit more involved than it appears. Typically, you’d need to start by researching the correct size and confirming that it’s correct. That usually involves reading a bunch of long articles before even starting to design. It turns out there’s also a lot misinformation when it comes to the correct social media image sizes.

Once you do figure out the proper size, you might realize that your audience can be viewing the cover/header on any wide range of devices such as a desktop computer, a mobile device, a tablet or even a TV. … Yikes … This usually leads to hunting for a template that has all the guides built-in. These are typically only available for software like Photoshop and can be very clunky to use. They include complicated layer groups and don’t even always ensure your image is visible on all devices.

That all changes today with new “Safe Areas” in Stencil! Now you can turn on/off overlays on the canvas that show you exactly where it’s safe to put graphics in your header/cover images, ensuring they won’t be cut off by profile photos or other changes between desktop/mobile/tablet/etc. This is now available for all Stencil plans (even free accounts, yay!) and is automatically enabled for the following cover/header images:

• Facebook Cover
• Twitter Header
• LinkedIn Company Cover
• LinkedIn Personal Cover
• YouTube Channel Art

Just select one of those from the canvas resizer and the “Safe Area” guides will appear. If the overlays ever get in your way, you can always turn the “Safe Area” on or off, using the social media icon to the right of the canvas:

We hope you find this new feature extremely useful and this will make creating header/cover photos a total breeze. Here’s a quick video showing the creation of a Facebook Cover image from start to finish, in less than a couple of minutes:

Let us know in the comments if this was helpful and saved you a ton of time!

The post Create Perfect Social Covers/Headers With New Safe Areas appeared first on Stencil.

There are 50,000+ WordPress plugins in the official directory and new ones are added daily. With the increase of plugin availability for optimizing functionality and improving productivity it can be hard to pick out the “right” ones.

Which plugins will be right for your WordPress site?

The first step, don’t rush into any plugin! You’ll want quality plugins.

To find out which plugin is a good quality plugin, you’ll have to do a bit of research by checking reviews, ratings, and check for support queries. This will give you an overall idea if the plugin is a good fit for your blog.

Questions to ask:

Does it have a 4-5 star rating?
If so, were there many downloads of the plugin and reviews that truly qualify it as a good quality plugin or was it just one lonely review?

How many reviews does it have?
One review won’t help much to gather much insight. If it’s a new plugin, then you can take the plunge and go for it, especially if it’s free. Check it out. If it didn’t work out as expected then leave a review and deactivate it. No biggie!

Are there any complaints in the reviews?
Be very careful to read the complaints. See if there’s an ongoing theme of negative feedback.

Is the WordPress plugin developer responding to support issues?
This is where you can get a quick synopsis if they are responding to feedback in the reviews and support questions. If you see a steady stream of support queries listed that are recent then this tells you that they care about the plugin and are actively updating. If you haven’t seen any support queries for a year or more then it’s probably not wise to download it.

Ok, now that you have an idea of what to look for to find a quality plugin we’ll get to our list of must-have WordPress plugins for your blog.

Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Bloggers

Editorial Calendar

Wouldn’t it be neat to have all your blog content listed in a nice clean editorial calendar? Even better is if you can access the calendar directly in your blog! The Editorial Calendar plugin can do this for you. It gives you an overview of which posts will be published on specific days. It also helps manage multiple author posts. If you need to move a draft post to a different day, no problem, just drag it to a new day!

Stencil

Ahem… well we have to include Stencil to this list! We’re excited about this plugin because it epitomizes our mission to help bloggers and social media marketers create visual content faster and easier than imagined. Stencil is already pretty fast and easy as a web app but it’s at a whole other level with the plugin!

Creating images for blog posts can get a little time consuming depending on how often you blog. You have to think about your featured blog image, blog images throughout the post, and the pin images for Pinterest.

As you create images, you have to download and upload to WordPress. Now with the Stencil for WordPress plugin, there’s no need to download and upload because while you’re drafting a blog post you can create images to add directly to your media library. Yes, that’s right! Create the visual, add to the media library, insert into the post – BOOM! You’re done.

Sumo

It’s kind of like the Swiss Army knife of digital marketing. You can grow your email list with timed pop-up forms and send your subscribers a welcome email when they sign up to your blog. Add share buttons to your WordPress site so pages and posts can be shared on social. It integrates with WooCommerce so you can generate more sales for your online business. The dashboard is terrific by providing an easy capture of what’s working on your site.

TastyPins

If you’re a hardcore Pinterest user then this plugin is a must-have. It will make blogging with images so much easier. There’s a difference between SEO for Google and SEO for Pinterest and this allows you to differentiate the alt tag properly and the pin description without having to a bunch of code in the backend. Although it’s not a free plugin, it’s definitely worth looking into if Pinterest is a major referrer for your blog.

Yoast SEO

We love Yoast! Super easy to use to optimize blog posts automatically. XML sitemaps automatically created so search engines can find your content easily. After you write your blog posts you can add your keywords and meta description to enhance your blog post SEO. It also lets you know when your paragraphs are too long. If you have specific images that you only want to be shared to certain social media platforms you can designate that as well with Yoast. It’s an incredibly powerful plugin!

Which WordPress Plugin is Your Favorite?

There you have it! Five awesome must-have WordPress plugins that every blogger would enjoy recapped below:

1. Editorial Calendar
2. Stencil
3. Sumo
4. Tasty Pins
5. Yoast SEO

Which of these plugins is your favorite? There are so many plugins available for WordPress, did we miss your favorite?

Let us know in the comments!

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The post Five Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Blog Marketing appeared first on Stencil.

Basic Tips to Boost Your Productivity

First, let’s just start off with some common sense tips to get you into productivity mode. Everyone is different so you can pick and choose these tips as you see fit for your individuality.

Get Sleep

Simple! If you know you’ve got a deadline coming up make sure to get some sleep. How can you function if you don’t have a good amount of sleep?

Turn Off Notifications

Seriously, turn off all notifications on your computer and phone. Notifications are a huge distraction.

Get Dressed and Put Your Pants On

When working from home, people often think you can lollygag in your pajamas all day or maybe you think pajamas are not so bad. WRONG!

When you’re working from home, you’ve got to get dressed. Not business on the top and party on the bottom mode either. You have to be completely dressed including pants you’d wear in public. You’ll notice an incredibly positive difference when you’re wearing pants!

Remove All Distractions

If your a Netflix watcher or the kids have the day off, working from home can be a little distracting. When you have a deadline that project has to get finished so it’s important to remove all distractions. That means to close the door and tell everyone in the household to not knock unless it’s an emergency, put the phone ringer on mute, and do not put on the TV. You know best what distracts you the most so remove it from your area until you’re done.

Be Hungry or Stay Hungry

This is very personalized. There are some people who find not eating to be exactly what they need to finish a task, then they can eat as a reward. However, there are some people, like me, that if I don’t have my belly full I can’t work. It’s completely up to you.

Now that you have these basic tips to get productive we can move onto tools.

Tools to Boost Your Work Productivity

Project Management

We’ve talked about these tools for project collaboration before and they’ll help improve your work productivity too. When everyone on your team is on the same page then you’re working productively.

Asana

This project collaboration tool helps a team stay on task with checklists and calendars. Marketing campaigns and product launches are all mapped out for team members.

Trello

It’s a visual platform to organize thoughts into neat lists and cards. Think of all your ideas on sticky notes arranged in order but on your computer. It’s easy to use and collaborate with a team where ideas can flow!

Focus Tools

Get yourself focused with sounds of music or noise.  It’s absolutely true that music or certain sounds can help you become more productive.

Brain.FM

They call it music for the brain. Depending on the type of mental state you need at the moment, you can select from Focus, Meditation, or Relaxation settings. It plays for 2 hours or you can adjust as needed.

Noisli

A background noise generator with nature sounds, white noise, and other elements. I personally prefer Noisli because of the nature sounds and the train sounds. I don’t know why I prefer the train sounds maybe because I feel like I’m chugging along with my work (pun intended… I’m sorry ) or I kind of put it in my mind that the train is catching up to me so I better work quickly. Either way, I find it works for me. Hopefully, you can find a combo that’ll work for you with your productivity.

Email Tools

Right Inbox

By installing Right Inbox, you’ll get all the functionality that you wish Gmail included as standard.  Right Inbox brings your email productivity with such features as; email tracking, email follow ups, email signatures, email scheduling and email reminders. They have some other features that are worth checking out as well.

Mailshake

Mailshake is a sales engagement platform that helps salespeople create highly personalized outreach cadences using email (via your personal email account), social, and phone. With Mailshake, you can upload a list of prospects with personalization fields like name, links to social profiles, phone numbers, and even fully personalized sentences and paragraphs.

Once you publish the cadence, the messages are sent automatically according to your campaign settings, and can be paused automatically if a recipient replies or clicks a link. When a lead engages with your outreach, you can reply to them directly from Mailshake, or through your own email. You can also track your campaign’s performance in real time, and see which messages in your cadence have the best engagement.

MixMax

All I can say is WOW. MixMax provides a robust email tool to take care of many annoying and time-staking tasks. Want to schedule a meeting? You can share your availability right from your calendar and it pops into the email. Wondering if the new client opened up your email? You can track the email. Need templates for typical emails you send? You can set that up. You can also set up sequences right from your Gmail. There are many other ways to use MixMax that I haven’t dabbled in but it’s pretty exciting.

Grammarly

We’ve mentioned this tool in our tools for bloggers post. It’s an awesome tool when you’re writing emails. It has a Chrome extension and can be used directly in Gmail or anywhere on the web. It’s saved me on some potentially embarrassing emails.

Organized Notes

Google Keep

Love the simplicity of Google Keep! You can create to-do lists, store articles, color coordinate labels, drag and drop notes into a Google doc, transcribe notes from photos, and more.

Evernote

Most people love Evernote! It’s a robust tool to keep teams on track with notes for brainstorming sessions, research, audio files, reminders of deadlines, etc. Lots of users create entire blog posts in it! There are many ways to use it that they have certified consultants to help you use Evernote to your best ability and to be as productive as a team for your business.

Milanote

Milanote is an easy-to-use tool to organize your ideas and projects into visual boards. It’s the perfect tool for teams to organize visually. It’s perfect for designers, creatives, marketers, writers, agencies or startups.

Time Tracking

Harvest

Harvest is a web-based time tracking and invoicing application relied on by creative businesses in over 100 countries.

Toggl

Easy to track time with Toggl to keep projects within deadlines and works great for hourly freelancing projects.

Not Really a Tool But Call it a BONUS

We’re always looking to be productive with various features to make it fast and easy for Stencil users. This is not a tool but it’s a feature in Stencil that can help with productivity! If you batch your images in a certain time frame then this is for you.

You can now download multiple images at one time into a zip file! If you batch 10, 20, 30 or more at a time you’d save your images as usual then CTRL + click each image you’d like to download into the file or if you use a Mac hold the Command key + click. Check it out below.

We know it’s not really a tool but it’s a cool feature that’ll help with productivity.

Will You Use These Productivity Tools?

You’ve got to have the basic tips in place before you can really check if these tools will work for you. Take the time to get yourself a bit organized before you dive into multiple tools. Try one or two for a month to see if you can see a difference in your productivity.

Over to you – Will you use these productivity tools?

Do you think there are some tools we missed?

Let us know what your favorite productivity tools are in the comments.

The post How to Boost Your Work Productivity with Tools appeared first on Stencil.

Automation tools help in all sorts of areas of business, however, the most used automation is within marketing strategies. According to Adestra, 74% of marketers say that the biggest benefits of automation are saving them time. With this list, we’ll include marketing automation tools, workflow management tools, financial tools, calendaring tools, and more.

Marketing Automation Tools for Business

Buffer

This is a social media scheduling tool that has a wonderful way of analyzing social media posts. At a quick glance, you can see how your social media posts are engaging and simply re-buffer the content that your audience likes with a simple click. It automatically has a schedule set that you can follow or set up your own schedule. Buffer also has an extension to buffer any articles you like and would like to share on social media. Love that it helps schedule a variety of social media networks including Pinterest and Instagram. It’s very easy to use and you can have a team help buffer content into your queue with their awesome plan.

CoSchedule

We’ve mentioned CoSchedule in our top blogging tool list for their headline analyzer but CoSchedule does so much more for marketing. It’s an all-in-one tool based on a cross-functional marketing calendar to organize: social media content, blog content, email marketing campaigns, project collaborations with teams, and analytics. Pretty powerful tool!

MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a social media scheduling tool that recycles evergreen content into categories and schedules posts out the way you want to with your audience. Very easy to use and they’re working on getting Pinterest and Instagram posting capabilities.

Missinglettr

This automation tool is pretty awesome to share blog content! You don’t have to really think about copy for your social media posts because it automatically does it for you. It grabs quotes and images from the actual blog post to include in the social media post. It also includes hashtags that are rated in popularity. Each blog post gets a 12-month campaign automatically. All you have to do adjust any hashtags, copy, or image. You can also adjust the branding settings to your brand color for a consistent brand look.

Make Automation Apps Work for YOU

IFTTT

If This Then That helps create applets that bring services together to create a new experience. This tool is helpful for regular daily tasks that are annoyingly tedious. There are so many recipes you can try. You can tell it to save emails in Gmail with a specific subject to be sent to your Slack or you can automatically save the tweets that you like to be sent to Pocket so you can read them later. There are so many possibilities! Many of the services they have are home-related like Philips Hue lighting, connecting Alexa to talk with your Neato vacuum, and get the weather sent to your Gmail Calendar. If you can better organize your home, you can get more stuff done for work or vice versa.

Zapier

In Zapier, you can create workflow ideas with app integrations that are called Zaps. This is a mighty tool to set up every workflow you can think of.  You can connect your Feedly articles to your Buffer queue or connect your new tweets to your LinkedIn company profile. I personally have Typeform responses to Trello and Instagram posts to Buffer. There are very unique ways to make your content work for you.

Collaboration Project Management Apps

Asana

This project collaboration tool helps a team stay on task with checklists and calendars. Marketing campaigns and product launches are all mapped out for team members. People who use Asana love it when they get a flying unicorn across the screen when they check a task off a list. I must say there is something definitely satisfying about unicorns in general but imagine getting work done with a celebratory unicorn. That’s a celebration right there!

Trello

You can use Trello for content management and project management for your business. It’s a visual platform to organize thoughts into neat lists and cards. Think of all your ideas on sticky notes arranged in order but on your computer. It’s easy to use and collaborate with a team where ideas can flow!

Asana and Trello are both absolutely great but built for different types of people. From what I’ve encountered with colleagues, you’re either Team Asana or Team Trello but not both!

Calendaring Apps

Acuity

In every business there are meetings and the biggest hassle is scheduling them. There used to be lots of back and forth emails but that’s not the case anymore. Acuity does an amazing job connecting with your calendar and allowing people to schedule directly via email or Facebook. You can also embed it into your website, sell gift certificates for sessions, and provide intake forms to make the best out of your meeting.

Calendly

This calendaring app works very well and the user experience is enjoyable. No more back and forth emails and lots of ways to embed, integrate, and automate leads with this tool.

These two tools are very similar and powerful, the main difference is the user-interface and how you’d like to display your calendar. One uses circles for dates and the other is calendar-like.

Financial Tool for Business

Quickbooks

Get your income, expenses, pay employees, manage taxes, and reporting all done in one place. If you have a product business, it manages inventory as well. The automation part of this type of tool is where it communicates with your banking companies for account information. No need to look for account numbers or routing numbers as long as you log into your bank accounts it’ll find all of the information needed within seconds. It’s the best of the best for solopreneurs to large companies.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools

17hats

This is an all-in-one tool to organize, systemize, and grow your business. Organize your contacts, leads, invoices, contracts, workflows from lead to payment, it’s all in there. It syncs with your calendar and email so you have everything at your fingertips.

Dubsado

This is also an all-in-one tool to organize everything that an entrepreneur or small business needs to organize and systemize. It integrates with many other services so it automates the tedious tasks for you.

Again, these two tools are quite similar and colleagues either love 17hats or Dubsado. It’s all about user experience preference.

Not Quite Automation, But Will Definitely Speed Up Your Workflow

Stencil Chrome Extension

Super fast image creation with quotes with the Stencil extension is awesome! When there’s a quote that you like on the web and want to share it with your followers. Highlight it and click the Stencil extension to have it pop into the design canvas to create an inspirational quote image. You can then preview and share it or queue it into your Buffer account. How easy is that?

Loom Extension

If you need to communicate with your team with a quick video or want to explain a process for a client, Loom is there. Loom has an extension that you can click on when you’re ready to do a screen share and share immediately with a link. It’s also integrated with Slack and team members can see the video without having to go out of Slack.

LastPass

Nothing is worse when you’re working then all of sudden the biggest hold up is forgetting a password. Doh! It’s a ridiculous waste of time. LastPass securely keeps all your logins and passwords. There’s a handy extension with just a click you can access all passwords if you have multiple accounts on a website. This particularly great if you want to share passwords with a virtual assistant or team member. They would not gain access to the password itself just the LastPass ‘key’ and they’re in!

What your Favorite Automation Tools for Business?

Now you have our top automation tools for business! We hope that we did some of the research you were going to do and now it’s off of your plate. No matter what stage of business you’re in or how big of a business you have, automation tools can save a lot of time, keep you productive, and provide a positive workflow.

What’s your favorite automation tool?

Let us know in the comments!

The post Top Automation Tools that Make Business Easy appeared first on Stencil.

What are Collections and Who Can Use Them?

Think of Collections as your personal categorized file folders. You can name them however you’d like, if you have a special project, ad, campaign, client, etc. Collections are located in the Photos, Icons, Templates, Quotes, Uploads, and Saved Images sections.  The best part about them is that they’re available to EVERY Stencil user! (So tempted to create an “Oprah meme” here but too classy to do that.?)

Where can Collections be found?

There are three ways to access Collections in Stencil.

1. You can right-click on a photo, icon, template, quote, uploaded image, or saved images and a drop-down menu will appear with Collections as an option.

2. Access through the drop-down header list from Featured Photos, Featured Icons, Featured Templates, All Uploads, All Saved Images.

3. The three line icon on every photo will give you access to Collections as well.

How to Create, Edit, and Delete a Collection

Once you access Collections, you’ll find a button to Create Collections and here is where the magic happens. Name the Collection whatever you’d like.

Create multiple Collections at a time and find them listed immediately. You’ll notice a 0 next to them, indicating there are 0 photos in the Collection (see the image below). Add a photo by right-clicking on it to access the drop-down menu and click on the designated Collection the photo belongs to. You’ll see the number change from 0 to 1.

When you access Collections from the Featured Photos, Templates, and Icons areas you can edit and delete Collections.

The Collections are alphabetized as created, however, if you find certain folders need more access than others that are labeled later in the alphabet we’ve considered that this may be an annoying factor to keep scrolling down the list. The four directional arrow is available to move Collections towards the top in the order that you’d access more frequently.

How to Organize Existing Images

What if you’ve been a long time Stencil user going back to the “Share as Image” days? You probably have thousands of images saved just like me. How can you organize all of those existing images and keep a high level of productivity? This is where the keyboard shortcuts will come in handy.

Go to your Saved Images section and to choose the images that you’d like in the same Collection, you can click on CMD for Mac users or click on CTRL for Windows users. Check it out below!

Now, this method works best when you have to pick and choose in between photos. If you have multiple photos that can go into the same collection, you can use the SHIFT button on your keyboard to select a whole bunch of photos at one time. This will be your time-saver! Watch it in action below.

As you can imagine, once you have all your images in order, all of your visual marketing projects will become a breeze to navigate and edit. You’ll have more time to create images and other areas of your business. Just a bit of a shift will make a great difference!

This also applies to Uploaded images. For businesses with products, authors with book covers, photographers with their own photos this is an amazing feature to get Uploads organized! Especially for agencies or virtual assistants who have multiple clients, you can now have Collections named after each client and have all areas completely organized in Stencil.

Click on the circle of the designated Collection to add the photo in it. If you click on the circle a second time, it will remove the image from the Collection. If that happens don’t fret, you haven’t lost anything the photos will always be there just re-click the circle.

How will Collections Increase my Productivity

Think of Collections as filters. All photos will stay in the sections and will not be deleted to go into Collections. You’ll find yourself using Collections to be your first step while creating images. For example, if you know you’ll be focusing on a winter wonderland theme for your next project then your photos will be focused on winter themed images. Hopefully, you’ve accumulated some winter photos already or if not you can simply search them and place them in a Winter Collection.  As you proceed with this project and create multiple images, you’ll go straight to your Winter Collection and this will save you time without having to search every time.

This also captures on-branding images. If there is a certain look that you need for a particular client or brand, a Collection is ideal to have to maintain those photos so you’ll never stray into other ideas. Less of the shiny object syndrome and more focus on the branding style.

What are your thoughts?!

Will you be taking advantage of Collections? We hope so! This has been the #1 requested feature for a long time now and we’ve worked hard to make it work for all Stencil users.

Let us know if you like Collections or if you have any feedback, let us know in the comments!

The post Organize Images and Increase Productivity with Stencil appeared first on Stencil.

Simple Graphic Design Tips for the Non-Designer

Background

First, let’s talk background. Now you’ve found an amazing photo and you really want to use it. The question is how? Sometimes a photo looks amazing but when you start working on the design it kind of doesn’t work out. No matter how you place the text or change the filter it still doesn’t look the way you want it.

When you look at the amazing photo, have an open mind. Know that the photo you’re looking at straight on will most likely change. Never go in thinking the photo is going to remain exactly the same and placing text on it will work perfectly. It rarely does.

Second, ask yourself if the photo is relatable and proper for your audience. Let’s face it. Sometimes we pick photos because they’re so gorgeous but don’t think of how followers or clients will relate to it. This tulip image is a perfect spring image. Perhaps you’re having a spring sale for your business, then this image may work. Let’s continue on and go through a couple of ways to work it out.

Transparency

Using the transparency feature in Stencil is just a click and slide away (as shown below).

When you have a busy image with no white space then transparency is your best bet in making the text stand out. You still see the tulips in the background and you’re now preparing the image for the message.

Let’s talk about the font for your message.

Fonts

Before you place your message onto the background, you have to choose your fonts. Only choose one to two fonts. When choosing fonts, make sure it’s appropriate to the design. Meaning, if it’s an image about a professional business, then using fonts like: Butterfly Kids, Chewy, Comic Sans MS, CODYSTAR, etc. are not appropriate.

Since the tulip image we’re using is for a spring sale, we’ll want to use a professional type so stay away from fancy script fonts and frilly fonts.

Stencil has an excellent font list however you can use Google Web Fonts directly through Stencil for more variety or upload your own font.

Good professional looking fonts will be clear and concise. You don’t have to stick with Arial, Times New Roman or Verdana. There are some excellent professional fonts such as: Hammersmith One, Helvetica, Montserrat, Open Sans, Oxygen, Quando, Quattrocento Sans, and Raleway. The key is to stick with one as your header or title and a second as your body font.

Combine fonts that are similar with the header preferably with more weight than the body font.

Here’s an example:

As you can see the spring sale text has a bit more weight or thicker than the body text. You can also use bold or an italic version of the same font to change the weight of the lettering.

It’s clear and concise in what the image wants to represent and has to offer.

Font Alignment

A good design always has proper alignment and the text should not be scattered throughout the image. Making the message legible and easy to read is the goal of the image. Stencil makes it easy to align the text with gridlines.

Note the colors of the text, let’s chat about that.

Font Color

I used a dark magenta color using the color spectrum in Stencil to match the darker tulips in the background. Simply move the dot within the box to get the color variant you’d like. Keep the colors similar. If I chose red for my header and green for the body then it wouldn’t look very professional.

Rather than use the color spectrum, you can find some great color palettes with HEX codes that can be entered into Stencil from these sites:

Color-Hex

Coolors

Text

Less text is best. Try to convey your message with minimal text. Your image should get people to stop and look rather than scroll through the social media stream. If the image has too much text it will not be read and will be passed on. Another way to use less text is to use icons.

White Space or Pattern Background

Talk about white space! This is an ideal photo that gives you a lot of space to work with for text. Any image that gives you open space with no objects in a section of the photo is white space. You can do a lot with this image.

As you can see I was able to use the white space quite easily.

People tend to be afraid of pattern backgrounds however they are very easy to work with. Most of the time you just need to adjust the font color or add the background color of the text.

Here are a couple of examples of different ways to use a pattern background:

Keep it simple with a contrasting color for text or a color background behind the text.

Color Overlays and Filters

Color overlays can be fun and can match your branding. Louise Myers does an excellent job in keeping within her brand with a purple overlay.

It’s a look that’s easy to maintain especially for blog post and social media images.

Filters can be great to provide a bit of texture or dimension to a photo.

What if you make a mistake?

Ok so we’ve gone through different ways of creating images but what if you make an error? Stencil has recently launched the Undo/Redo feature! It will create a history list of all your design moves. Pretty awesome, right?!

No need to worry about changing an image and wondering how to go back. You can create an image freely and know that it’s ok to make mistakes.

Let’s recap the design tips for the non-designer!

• Keep an open mind when designing. You never know where the design will go.
• Don’t be afraid to use busy backgrounds with the transparency feature.
• Choose 1-2 fonts that are relatable to the image.
• Combine fonts that are similar by using font variants.
• Keep your fonts in order! Align them easily with Stencil’s gridlines.
• Use font colors that correlate with the background image or provide a contrast of the background.
• Keep text short and sweet.
• Use icons rather than text when appropriate.
• Take advantage of white space and patterns.
• Color overlays and filters should be used with branding.
• Mistakes… what mistakes? The Undo/Redo feature is now available.

Which design tips for the non-designer listed have helped you with your image creation?

The post Simple Graphic Design Tips for the Non-Designer appeared first on Stencil.

ViralTag Special offer at bottom of post

Here’s How to Become a Visual Superhero with ViralTag and Stencil

First, create social media images for your business by using Stencil.

If you get stuck and need a bit of inspiration, take a look at the templates that are readily available, to tweak with little effort. You can make your own design to fit your business needs.

When you create your own design that works for you. You can make it into your own template to use over and over again with a simple change of a background and text. Templates save an immense amount of time!

Remember it’s just a click of a button to change the image into a Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. post!

Not sure what kind of quote image to create? Simply find a quote in the Stencil’s quote library or if you’ve found a quote around the web you can use Stencil’s super fast browser extension to highlight the quote and create an image on the spot.

Click Save and download the images and save them to your computer or save computer space by using Google Drive or Dropbox (easy access in ViralTag – read on!).

*Time-saving tip* – Create batches of images in one sitting by dedicating 15-30 minutes a week.

Are you ready to become a visual social media superhero?

Now comes in ViralTag to save you social media time

With all the fabulous images that you’ve created in Stencil, you’ll now need to share on social media. How can you do that and make sure they look exactly the way you want and save time at the same time? ViralTag is the social media scheduling tool that helps you create social media posts in a fraction of the time.

ViralTag is the perfect tool for people who work better in a visual environment. The user interface is not only easy on the eyes but you see exactly what will be posting on social media.

To create a post simply click on the plus sign in the red box. You’ll find the below image where you can pull images from your computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram!

When you access where your images are then you can select which ones you’d like to create a post for. Then a Bulk Editor will pop up to create posts for the social media accounts you have connected.

Of course, the copy you have for Facebook and Twitter would vary so you’ll want to click on the Clone Post button to have a post specific for each social media platform.

Once you’ve completed your posts in the Bulk Editor, then click on schedule posts or add to queue. Boom! That’s it.

What’s fascinating about ViralTag too is that all those old images you’ve created in Stencil and posted long ago can be repurposed by simply accessing your Facebook Pages or Albums, Flickr, and Instagram accounts.

If that’s not a super power I don’t what is?! Being able to repurpose content with just a few clicks is fantastic news.

You can either find the images through a list or click on Show Files to visually see what was posted. Super cool? Yep, we think so. It’s on all access to the files for Drive and Dropbox too. I’m a visual person, so whatever I named a file a year or two ago, well I have no clue what is so being able to see it is such a great help.

ViralTag also has a super browser extension just like Stencil! Say if you’re in Pinterest and see an image that would be great to share, a simple click on the ViralTag icon on the image can be scheduled into your social media queue. Genius!

Are you ready to unleash your super powers?

We know how important it is to save time and money on your business for social media. Stencil and ViralTag have teamed up! ViralTag knows how crucial visuals are and we know how crucial social media scheduling is.

We have superhero deal where you can get a free trial to ViralTag for 2 whole months*!

Use the code: STENCIL2MONTHS

The code expires on March 31, 2017 at 11:59PM EST so you’ve got to sign up now to give your powers a whirl!

*Only available to new customers.

So go on… be the extreme social media superhero you’ve always wanted to be.

The post Become a Visual Marketing Superhero with ViralTag and Stencil [Special Offer Inside] appeared first on Stencil.

Top 5 Social Media Scheduling Tools

Most social media schedulers compromise of the basic features: queues, feeds, and ideal schedule times. Queues will keep your content in one area and allow you to see what posts are scheduled. Feeds allow for a faster curation of content, where you can select from your favorite blogs to source content you want to share. Ideal schedule times are completely up to each tool, basically letting your content go out on a schedule they believe would benefit you and having your content seen most often. These are the basics. The social media scheduling tools we’ll go through have a focus on visual content (including these basic functions) and how they best serve per social media platform.

Buffer

Buffer is an amazing social media schedule tool and started as a tool specifically for scheduling tweets in 2010. Since then, they’ve grown and created a scheduling tool for: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Buffer offers a free plan, which can easily get an entrepreneur started in just a few seconds. It also has wonderful extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera. These extensions are perfect to capture an article that you find on the internet that you’d like to share. Many websites already have their share icons include the Buffer logo, which makes it easy to share directly from the article. The Awesome Plan is geared towards small business owners or entrepreneurs that would like to schedule more than 10 posts at a time, it would allow up to 100 posts per profile. This also includes sharing with Facebook groups that you’ve created!

The best part about Buffer is that you can ‘re-buffer’ posted articles and you can track the posts quite easily to see how the post did.

Visual Focus:

• Tweets can include up to 4 images! They’ve completely nailed the way to tweet visually. It doesn’t disappoint for Facebook sharing either, although only 1 image can be featured.
• Sharing visual content to Pinterest and Instagram is super easy as well. However for Instagram, it doesn’t schedule directly to Instagram, it will send a notification to your phone to post.
• Stencil images can be buffered into the queue.

MavSocial

MavSocial is an amazing visually-focused social media marketing tool! What’s intriguing about MavSocial is the library of photos that can be used for scheduled posts. This is incredibly helpful when you come across a great article when they don’t provide a featured image, or if you’d like to change up the image to see which post gets more clicks. Another amazing feature is the capability to post videos directly from MavSocial to social networks. This tool posts to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Tumbler. You can track audience interactions and reply to comments within the program as well. The reporting system is wonderfully robust.

Visual Focus:

• It posts to YouTube and publishes video!
• There’s an image library within the program.

MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is an incredible social media scheduling tool! It’s more like a content management system. Every blog that you’ve written, even posts years ago, are recycled systematically from the Edgar Library. Every time you schedule a post in Edgar, it will be seen later in cycle as you fill the library. The library is categorized by categories you create so it’s a never-ending catalog of content (yours and other source content). There is a calendar to set your schedule and mark which type of post you’d like for a specific time. It really is a time saver, especially using their extensions available for Safari and Chrome! Edgar can be used for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Visual Focus:

• Edgar is perfect for Facebook sharing and can be connected with Facebook groups. The featured image of an article is automatically populated or an uploaded image can be used.

Tailwind

Tailwind is an official partner with Pinterest and Instagram! That right there tells you how reliable this tool is. Tailwind is an amazing scheduler for pins and also presents ‘hot pins’ that may be relevant to your Pinterest boards. It also analyzes the boards to make sure they’re optimized to its fullest potential. The reporting capabilities and extensions are great too!

Visual Focus:

• Posting from an Instagram account to Pinterest is seamless!
• Published pins are easily tracked and can be re-pinned.

ViralTag

ViralTag is an awesome social media marketing tool for sharing visuals. ViralTag originally started off as a Pinterest scheduler and they later grew into a complete social media scheduling tool for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumbler. It’s quite impressive to see potential Pinterest pins available to pin immediately without going into Pinterest. There’s an Evergreen Content section that’s similar to a library for repurposing content. ViralTag also has analytics to help you find which posts are doing well. Scheduling is easy with their extensions too.

Visual Focus:

• Super Pinterest-friendly and share pins directly from the app.
• When scheduling posts, the featured images are automatically populated.

Social Media Scheduling Tools for Everyone

There are many different types of social media scheduling tools and it’s hard to say which is absolute best. They all offer unique features and every business or brand have their own unique needs. These tools that we’ve covered are the best tools for visual content marketing.

Which social media scheduler is your favorite?

The post Top 5 Social Media Scheduling Tools (Visual Content Focused) appeared first on Stencil.

Social media marketing can be a chore finding out what your audience would like to see, let alone creating images that will entice potential customers. Here at Stencil, we want to make social media graphics easy and fast for business owners. We’re making big strides in making sure that Stencil can become your go-to image tool. The faster and easier it is for you to make social media images, the better your business will flow with social media graphics made easy with templates.

Stencil’s Template Feature Makes Social Media Graphics Easy

If you’re new to Stencil, you can find an area in Stencil called Templates (left-side in between Icons & Graphics and Quotes). This is where you can find a template that can be used for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and more.

You’ll find that there are a variety of templates to choose from and underneath the Featured button, you can click on All to get a dropdown of different categories that would fit your needs. Have a look:

What are templates?

 

Templates help in different ways for each individual.

For some people, when they’re ready to create a social media image, they know exactly what they’re looking for but not sure how to put it together. Templates become a source of inspiration. They may not use the templates and start fresh or they’ll use a few elements and create a whole other look.

Some people are not sure how to start a social media graphic, and templates become their guide. The awesome thing about templates is that you can choose to do whatever you want with it. You’re not stuck with all of it, if you don’t want.

There may be certain fonts and colors you like about a template and change out the background to fit your needs. Or you may not like the colors and simply change the color.

A template can be used for each social media platform and saved in the My Templates section. This will be another time saver when creating images.

You can save the new image as a template with the button shown below.

What’s the purpose of templates?

Templates are used to make social media graphics easier and to keep a consistent look, especially for branding purposes. As a business, you may have a branding style guide to keep images consistent. The fonts, colors, design elements can be kept intact for future use. Therefore when all of the branding elements are saved on a template, it’s just a matter of switching out backgrounds and text. Fast and easy!

Keeping templates will keep your tasks more productive every day and not having to think about what to do for each image.

The Updates

Stencil’s goal is to listen to feedback of users and make Stencil better for everyone to use. We had an overwhelming request for more templates so we are adding at least 20 new templates every week! No more searching for ideas or inspiration to help create social media images. You’ll have new images to try out as a template.

Other awesome news about updates is that we have a new notification bell of updates that have been made to inform you of changes. Now every time something new has been added or an improvement has been made, you’ll know first thing when you’re using Stencil.

Check it out below! The notification bell is next to My Account while you’re creating your image.

If you’re curious to see the log of updates, you can always check here.

Wrapping up templates and updates

Creating social media graphics are so much fun to create when you have a source of inspiration and guide to help you. Stencil templates can now be that source of inspiration you need.

Let us know which template you like best and if you like the new notification bell in the comments.

The post Social Media Graphics Made Easy with Templates (Plus Updates) appeared first on Stencil.