If you're in the world of online marketing at all, you've probably
heard about this little graphic design software tool called canva.
Maybe you even found out about how to use it from one of my videos. But how
can canva help you without costing you. Can you use canva for free? Let's talk about that today.
I'm going to share with you the differences between the free and the paid version of
canva and hint I used the free version of canva for years before ever paying a dime
for it. Then I'm going to show you the trick to sharing your canva designs with your team.
Then I'm going to show you three ways to improve your social media strategy with canva and "yes"
for free. So canva is a web-based graphic design platform. You can create social media graphics,
presentations, posters, tons of different printables, documents, video thumbnails, and more really the
sky is limit. Anything you want to design you can do it on canva. It's free to use but they do have a paid
version of it where you can pay more to access more functionality and again, I use this platform
for free for years without needing the different functionalities. Let me share with you what you may
choose to pay for if you want some of these extra functionalities. So you may choose to use the paid
version if you want access to their stock images and videos for any of the designs that you create.
You may want it to be able to have transparent backgrounds in your images and you may want is if
you want to share some of your designs with your team without giving away your password for them to
log in. Again, I use this for free for years and the only reason why I did switch over to paying for is
when I wanted transparent background on my image. But even that, you could pay for it for a time that
you need it and then discontinue the subscription service and then just keep using it for free.
So as I mentioned, one of the benefits of using the paid version is that you can share designs with
other people on your team. So I'm gonna actually show you on my computer how you can create a
team in canva and how you can share those designs, and even how you can receive shared designs.
So there's a way that you can create a team on your canva account to be able to access all of the
same designs that you're creating in one place. But there's also a way that you can just share designs
with other people. I'm going to show you how you can do both. As you'll see from my dashboard here,
you'll see on the left navigation you can create a team but it does cost 12.95 per person per month
if you want to invite people to that team. So I can add the email addresses in right now and that way
they'll get invitation. So that they can get access to all of my designs that you can see here on my
dashboard. Also, on the left-hand navigation here. I can see all the designs that have been shared with
me through other people and their canva accounts. So I can bring people onto my team and pay an
additional monthly fee for them to be able to access all of my designs. But if I don't need that
much functionality, I can send individual designs to other people on their canva accounts. So for
example, this is one of our social media posts that we have here. If I wanted to share this, I'm just
going to click share in the right corner here and I can type in an email address for someone that
I might want to share that to. So I can either type in their email address here or I can click copy
link and that will send them to that direct link. So that they can also access and edit that image
themselves. Now, before we get into the three ways that you can use canva to improve your social media
strategy. Have you subscribed to my channel yet? If not, hit that subscribe button because
I'm sharing more tips like this every single week for how you can grow your business using a lot of
these tools or strategies. One of the first ways I'll share with you is how I love to use canva
by creating my Instagram stories through it. You can even make Instagram story highlights or just
images that you can use in the instagram story dimensions, send that to your phone, and upload it
as a story. So you'll see, if I go into my templates here and click on Instagram story you'll see all
of these Instagram story templates. Now you can use these as you as they are, you can change them out
for your specific designs. You can use them as just examples this is kind of fun if you wanted to use
this like important reminder and then upload that to your story. Maybe you want to change it
for your unique colors, your branding. Maybe you want to put a picture of yourself or your logo in it.
There's tons of ideas in here. I love to just scroll through the ideas here and get tons
of ideas for how I can be more captivating and engaging on my Instagram stories. A lot of these
templates itself right here will give you ideas for things that people aren't seeing on their
Instagram stories. How can you create kind of like a pattern interrupt based on what most people are
doing on their Instagram stories? This is a really great option here. I've also gotten questions about
Instagram story highlights and canva has tons of templates for those too. So, I'm going to search
right in the search bar and you'll see Instagram story highlight covers comes right up and you'll
be able to see lots of options for this too. Now if you don't know what an Instagram story highlight is,
it's when you go to someone's Instagram page. You go to their profile page and right between
their bio and their timeline you'll see those little circles with highlights. So that's some
of their stories that they've shared and instead of just archiving them and them not being able
to be viewable again. They might make highlights based on events or based on topics or categories.
I personally have highlights based on some of my events that I've done, content machine live,
or funnel hacking live, that I spoke at. I have a story highlight based on me filming, I show behind
the scenes of us filming YouTube content. So that people can go back and watch and get that content
anytime. Now, instead of just having like a random picture that it'll randomly choose from one of
your Instagram stories. You can actually design a highlight and I've seen some people do this. Where
maybe they'll put a word in that little circle or a little icon that defines whatever the topic is.
So for example maybe if it was a fitness account and one of the story highlights
was about working out. Maybe it would be like a dumbbell for one of them. If one of them was about
nutrition maybe it would be you know broccoli or a vegetable or something in that picture.
So as you can see here with the instagram story highlight cover templates, it gives you lots
of different options that you can create your own Instagram story highlight cover.
Now, another question I've gotten is can you create your own template in canva? Well sure you can.
Although canva has infinite ideas and suggestions for you to be able to just take one of theirs
and maybe you just decide to change the colors of it to fit your brand. You can look at the templates
for social media, for personal, for business, and maybe you just take one of their templates that's
your favorite and you change it out to be your colors, your fonts, your branding. However, I can
tell you from personal experience. I often make Instagram carousels. So, instead of creating it
from scratch what I've done is I've made several different templates that I can just go in and
out of every time I want to make one. So, let's look at my designs and you'll see that I have
three different Instagram post templates. So, what I do every time I want to use it is I'll just click
on the three dots in the right hand corner here and click make a copy and then that way you get to
use the template and use that over and over again without having to change what I've made last time.
If I click on here and you'll be able to see what the template looks like. All I did is I created
the template once and I created three different designs of it just changing around the format and
the design. So that maybe you know it's one is more gold, one is more black, one is more white, and then
I just change it up every time I make it. So as you can see in here I have a few different pages
of what it can look like and of course, I can copy it. Change it over to whatever the text is I want
to have in there and use it over and over again. The next thing that's going to help you improve
your social media strategy is there are endless options for Facebook posts that you can design on
canva. So if we go over to the templates and click right under templates, social media, Facebook post.
You'll see all the options, all the different designs that you can get tons of ideas for.
I love how canva actually gives you so many options based on the themes. Right now as I'm filming this
it's February. So the first things that came up were about valentine's day. So it's always trending
and keeping up with what's current. So that you can find you know ideas for what you could be
posting that is current and trending right now, and maybe I'll look at this and go you know what
I like this. But instead of the picture of her, I'm going to use a picture of myself. I'm going
to change it to my colors. I'm going to use this template and turn this into a social media post
for myself. So because this image gives me lots of inspiration instead of me starting from scratch.
Maybe what I'll do is I'll look at this photo and replace the picture of her with a picture of me.
Because I mean, I want to be promoting my brand. So I'm going to take one of these pictures. I'm
going to drag and drop it into place and i'm going to expand it to fill the spot. I'm going
to position it backward so that I can get that that circle that I just covered up, there we go
And because that's now covering up the picture of me. I'm just going to move it over and look at
that, that is so much easier than just starting from scratch and maybe, I'll change this copy
to be something about maybe a course I'm launching or a webinar that I'm having. And then, what I can
do is I can connect Facebook to my canva account and publish it directly to my Facebook page.
I mean, you can also download it, upload it. You can schedule with whatever scheduling platform
that you use. But voila, your designs are done. You don't have to pay an expensive graphic designer
or rack your brain trying to figure out how to design things from scratch. It is so easy by just
using the templates they have right here. If you want to learn more about creating content that
converts into cash flow. I have a free training for you. You can click the link below to get access to that today.