Welcome to episode 39 of the Profitable Speaking Podcast, where we provide practical tips and insights to help you succeed as a public speaker. Today's episode, we're going to look at using Canva.com to make your business look like a million dollars. I've been a paid user of Canva.com since I first started, and its growth as a unicorn company and as a tool has been phenomenal to watch and experience. I gotta be honest, I do 99% of all my design work using it. Even though I have access to the full Adobe Suite, I just find it easier to use Canva and a heck of a lot quicker. So it just makes my life so easy. For example, I had a set of 30 YouTube videos and a playlist. They were sitting there looking okay, and YouTube chose an image for the thumbnail. So I opened Canva, went to the YouTube thumbnails. Yes, there are a huge collection there, chose what I like and edited it up for the first video. Then I just duplicated it within the same document and changed the title and photo image. And it did this over and over for the whole of the 30 videos. Took about half an hour to do after I completed the first thumbnail, which probably took five to ten minutes. I then exported them all as a set of PNG files and uploaded them all to their video on YouTube. And look, seeing them all with the same branding made them look so professional. It was so easy. And then once you jump into Canva and you get on that Canva train, you're gonna get your mind blown by how easy it is to do this sort of thing. The best thing about doing the thumbnails was for that playlist, they actually look like a set. All their little title slides look the same. So when someone came to the page and looked at the playlist, they looked like they belonged together. And it just made a massive difference. By the time I did it to multiple playlists, I had these really nice sets. So the green set, the blue set, the red set sort of thing. And it just adds that professional touch to your work. It took next to no time at all. Anybody can do it. It would really click and play. It's so easy. So I use it for social media, and I've talked about it in previous episodes, for short videos, thumbnails, PDF files, images for websites, posters, Facebook cover art, LinkedIn covers, book covers, ebooks, and so much more. You really can't get better value for $120 a year. It's an absolute no-brainer investment for a speaker to be getting this. It just can change the way your stuff looks so easily. And you don't need design skills, which most of us don't have great design skills. I know I don't, but I'm very good at using Canva. Did you know that you can even design something like a pull-up banner and send it straight to Officeworks for printing? So you actually design it within the site and then it auto-exports into Officeworks Flow, and then you can go and pick it up from the Officeworks shop. Or you can even have your designs printed and shipped directly to your door. So if you want to do some business cards or you want to do some booklets or posters or whatever you want to do, again, you can do it in Canber and then send it to your printer. In Australia, obviously, Officeworks is their one of their print partners, but it's quite cost effective, depending on the numbers and all that. But either way, if you just want to take it to a normal printer, you can export it with the print marks on it, and a normal printer can print it for you. So it's such an easy tool to use, whether you're going for electronic stuff or you're going for printed material. It's such an amazing tool, and it can do almost anything you need to promote your business. But there are a couple of things that I want to say before I cover some of the latest tools they've added, because most people don't understand where Canva's gone. As I said, it can do everything from video editing through to just doing social media posts and things like that. The first is use your branding on everything that you do in Canva. So make sure you set your colours, your fonts, etc. Secondly, choose a style and stick with it across all designs. You need that consistent look. So when people see it straight away they know it's yours. And I've mentioned this before, but I'm just reminding you of it. And number three, and this is really important, if you come across a design that you like and you're going to use it again, possibly, save it as a template. Once you've made the changes to it, so it's in your branding colors and all that, then do a save as template and put it into your kit. And then you can use it again and again, because when you double-click on it, it'll make a new one pre-filled with what you've saved as the template, but you can just click on it and change it. Okay? Absolutely. So branding, style, template. Really important. If you apply those three rules, you'll get the best results out of Canva.com. Okay, so let's look at some of the latest additions to help you make your business look like a million dollars. First of all, they built a home for your brand. Canvas has a brand hub that allows you to craft and share your own visual identity. In this space within Canva, you can upload specific fonts. So you can actually upload a font. You can set colors, images, and logos all stored together in a brand kit to make sure that everybody is working from the same palette and also to speed up your colorslash font choice when editing. So everything you want for your brand can be stored in one place and you can access it easily on any design by just going into your brand kit. So if you need to get your logo to drag it on, it's in your brand kit. If you need to have your color set, you'll see when you go into colors to change things, straight away your brand kit colours are there for you. So you don't have to go and set the color tone properly, your hex code and all that sort of stuff. It's already saved there. It's such a big time saver. Number two, design ideas can be made magically and instantly by AI. So welcome to the game-changing time saver called Magic Design that they've added. This is the ultimate code designer. Magic design gives you a head start by instantly creating a list of multiple, often already refined templates that you can preview before you start designing. You just upload a photo that you want to use, and it then goes through all its designs and it picks out designs that will work really well with that photo, inserts the image, and gives you a curated choice of templates that you can click on and customize. So you upload a photo, it brings back a choice of templates, and you choose the one you want. So it just makes things a little bit easier. Instead of scrolling through thousands and thousands of different templates that they've got there, this gives you a little bit of a head start. Number three, you can now edit photos like magic within the system. You don't need Photoshop. You can make your photos look really good in the photo editor. Complex edits have been made simple with some new one-click magic tool to do work for you. So a bit like when you use your phone and you've got different tools built into the phone for editing photos. What once took a long time and took expensive software, e.g., Photoshop, to now be done in seconds. Magic Edit lets you add or replace something within an image. You choose where you want to have something, describe it to Magic Edit, and watch as it appears before your eyes. Gotta love generative AI. We talk about generative AI, which is can create things out of nothing. Photoshop's added this feature where you can create a new background to a photo or you can add something into a photo like I want to add in the tree to the back. They've got it in Canva as well. So just another great addition. Number four, you can sync soundtracks these days. So if you're making a video and you're trying to line up the beat with the cut so it switches in time. So you know, you see those things where the beat goes doom doom and the photo goes change. You can now do that effortlessly and perfectly timed with auto matching your soundtrack to your footage, and then you click beat sync. Nice and simple. Beats, nice name. You just upload your clips, choose your music, and let Canber do the heavy lifting to line it all up. So that's a difficult thing to do normally. I've done it in iMovie, but you've got to line everything up just right and drag things in. Have it done automatically is just amazing. Okay. Number five, sketch out your new ideas. A new draw tool lets you sketch up your ideas with free hand drawing, underlines or annotations. For example, a simple hand sketch shaped like a circle will be transformed into a perfectly polished circle by Shape Assist. So just because you didn't draw a perfect circle doesn't mean it's not going to turn out looking like a perfect circle. You no longer need another program like SketchWow to do sketch styling. All the tools are there for you to use. So everybody likes that hand-drawn look where you can do that now within Canva. Number six, bring your stories to life with animation. In Canva video, they've added a new feature called Create an Animation where you can bring your story to life with custom animation paths. So if you want your elements to zigzag or rotate across the screen, split up or slow down, just simply drag them across the screen to record the path and then add what you want done to it. You can then export that as a video or an animated gear to put into a presentation. This is great if you want like a little bee to come across the screen and do a loop around a flower and fly off to the other side. All sorts of opportunities to do little animations, which can be embedded on a web page or within a presentation that you're doing. Number seven, you get magic right through the whole system now. So magic is an AI tool, just like ChatGPT. It's now accessible in every design, including presentations, websites, whiteboards, docs, whatever. Whether you're writing a website copy or a catchphrase for a poster, it's there for you to use. You don't need to switch to ChatGPT when you're working on your designs. Yes, you can still integrate elements that you come up with on ChatGPT and put them on your poster, for example. But the magic right's there to suggest stuff. The other thing is it actually reads what you've already got in place and can suggest headlines, etc., based on your existing content. So it's it is built in and looks at what you're working on directly. So a nice little tool. Number eight, you can reach a global audience with translate. Simply add text to your design, and you can choose from over a hundred languages to instantly convert it without having to leave the design, and then you can just add it away. So if you want to take a poster and add other language onto it or convert it to another language, basically you take your original poster, you click on it to duplicate it, then click on the text and go to translate and translate it. Now, this might not be something you use often, and I would definitely suggest you get someone who's a native speaker to just check it to make sure it's actually accurate. But it's a great first step to help you convert some stuff across. Okay. So there you have it. I love Canva.com, not just because it's an Australian company, but because they actually focus on building the best tools for their users. And that's why I'm so loyal. They actually care. Okay? They haven't just done one thing. They just keep pushing the boundaries. If you don't have Canva.com, you can sign up for free and use it. You only need to pay to get access to more features like high-quality stock photos, additional to the ones you get for free and video and other areas within the system. But most of it you can access for free to a certain level. So sign up for free. And then, as I said, it's only $120 a year to BMO. It's absolutely worth it in the amount of time you will save. Imagine 30 thumbnails in Photoshop, how many hours that would do? Even if you don't know Photoshop, believe me, it would take a long time. This just makes it so much easier. Even if you're a tech phobic or a tech newbie, you can use this tool. Okay, this is like the Microsoft publisher on steroids. It's so much better. Okay? I hope you found this episode of our podcast on using Canva.com to make your business look like a million dollars interesting. If you did, I have a challenge for you. Hit that button and subscribe to the podcast right now. 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