How to choose the right cover designer

Selecting a cover art designer for your information product can be very intimidating, especially if you haven’t dealt with a designer before. You may not recognize the necessary questions or information that you need to provide or get from the cover designer.

Here are a few tips to get you on the right track, so that you can get the kind of order pulling cover art you want for your product, whilst maintaining a positive relationship with your designer. It will also help you in picking out the best designer for the specific kind of cover art you want , because designers each have a strong design area, either by virtue of working in the subject matter a number of times , or simply by natural talent

Outward appearance and first impressions: Visiting the designer’s website is like having a peep through the designers office. If the designer’s website gives you a good feeling, then chances are that you will like the design style of the designer. If the first impression you get from their website is not favorable, then chances are that you might not like the kind of work they do. That being said, there are many designers who are brilliant at what they do but are not very good at marketing themselves, which makes the next tip very important.

Portfolio: This is by far a very important aspect of choosing the right designer for youe ebook cover or cover art job. A sampling of the designers previous work will show you the kind of work that the designer is capable of doing. By checking the designers portfolio, you will be able to see how skilled the designer is, how striking their use of fonts, colour and images are, as well as the kind of niches they’ve designed for in the past.

Training and qualifications: learning how to use a software and knowing the fundamentals of design are two separate things. Graphic design is a field with established laws and guidelines. Any design that makes the prospect sit up and take notice has achieved what the designer set out to do. Formal design training has an advantage though there are many designers that are self taught who design better than the formally trained ones. The most important thing to remember is to choose a designer that can accurately capture the essence of your brand.

A good designer should be able to research or find out more about your product or service, so that they can create covers that will zero in on what your information product is all about. The final cover should be able to inform the prospect on what the product is all about. The cover also has a few second to catch and hold the attention of the customer.

The Design format: You need to find out from the designer what format that the designs will come in. You will need both high and low resolution versions of your design so that you can market your product both online and offline. Just bear in mind that the normal print resolution is 300 dpi ( dots per inch) and the resolution for web images is 72 dpi. The Dpi is just a measure of how big the graphics are. Using fuzzy graphics detracts from the effects of the cover and also looks very professional.

Copyright for images: You need to ask designers for the source of images used. You can be sued for breach of copyright if the designer uses images that they do not have the rights to use. Moreover, you are the one that the owner of the image will contact, because the cover is being used by you to market your product.

Since you will be working very closely with the designer, you will need to see a minimum of two design drafts to choose from. I have found that giving clients more than 3 drafts at atime confused them and also waters down the effort put into the cover design.

Price: The price charged by a designer does not necessarily mean that the designer’s work is good or bad. By comparing the going rates for other designers, you will be able to have an idea what the average prices are for the design of cover art. You also need to ask the designer how they accept payment and other payment terms.

Time : The designer also need to give you a rough estimate of the time it will take to design the cover i.e the lead time. If the designer’s workload is full, they will give you an idea of when you can expect the drafts and completion of the cover graphics.

Mode of delivery: Because of the internet, it is now very easy to conduct business with a designer without seeing them face to face. You can receive the drafts and the completed graphics by either email or by direct download from a specified web page.

Knowing the questions to ask your graphic designer will go a long way to making sure that your cover is designed successfully and that both parties are happy with the end result.

How to use PLR Products

How many Private Label right products have you got on your hard drive? And how much of them have you used ?

You can make your PLR pay you over and over again by repurposing it into different mediums and products. However, it helps if you have high quality PLR to start with. Even if the PLR you’ve got is not so great, You can still use it to jumstart your product creation activities.

The worst thing you can do is to sell your Private label rights products as is.
That is the most unimaginative way to do it and every Tom and Jane are doing it. You can set your self apart and make more money in the process by doing the following to your public domain and private label rights products.

PLR Creation: You can rewrite and add to your existing PLR, change the title and graphics and make it more high quality. Then you can resell it to fellow marketers.

Audio : Rewrite Your existing PLR and then read it loud, using audacity to record yourself reading. After recording, you can either sell it as an mp3 recording or burn it on CD and sell it as a physical product.

Ebook : Rewrite the PLR and change the title and graphics, then sell it as a downloadable ebook.

Articles: Break up the original PLR and Rewrite them as individual aericles to post in article directories or on your website.

Article Packs:You can rewrite the PLR yet again, add more information and sell them as article packs.

Tip of the week: You can break up the PLR and use them as tip of the week information for your subscribers and customers.

Email Course: You can use the PLR as an ongoing email course which you can either offer as a free or paid email course.

Twit Tips: You can offer snippets of the PLR as tweets on your twitter account. You can also offer a series of articles to your twitter friends and link to the articles from your twitter account.

Online video : You can create a powerpoint slide and then record the PLR as video which you can upload to youtube, Viddler and so on.

Web Conferences : You can use an improved version the PLR and then conduct a web conference or teleseminar. You have to come well prepared for questions from the attendees. On the other hand, you can pre record it.

Physical Book or Manual: You can improve on the original PLR, and then offer it as a physical book or manual which can be fulfilled by blurb.com or Lulu.com.

That should keep you going for a while

The way to get real value out of PLR is to use, and re use it in different ways.
Beacause you may have PLR already on your hard drive, you don’t have to start buying any. You can start with the one you already have. The key to success with PLR is to reuse and to recycle.

Useful Tools for the Online Publisher

To be a successful online publisher, you need some tools to help you run your publishing business. There are so many free and paid resources that can assist you. Below is a list of useful… and very FREE! tools that can make life easy for every publisher.

Some of these tools have premium or paid version . There are many other free and awesome tools around. This is just the first instalment – other tools will be mentioned in a future post.

1. Twitter – Very trendy and the search function updates even more instantly than the almighty Google. You can keep in touch with customers and prospects on the fly buy posting , tips , deals and trivia. This is a 140 character power tool you should be using already.
2. Freemind – This is a mind mapping tool that will help you plan your projects , brainstorming or just plain organise your thoughts.
3. Yugma is a no cost web conferencing facility that also offers collaboration and online sharing facilities. Though it has a paid option as well, the free version is superb and can comfortable get you started in hosting online seminars that you can record as an information product.
4. Youtube is still very hot for sharing videos and shooting your website high up in the search engines. You can create videos with your cell phone, web cam , or a screencasting software like Camtasia.
5. Ustream is the next big thing after Youtube – because you can stream live video to people all over the world in real time. You only need a video camera and internet connection and then you are set to go
6. Audacity – Want to create an audio program, podcast or increase value to your ebook by adding an audio version? Audacity is a very free and very high quality software for creating any type of audio product.
7. Jing is a screencasting facility that lets you create simple screencast videos . It is very user friendly and will help you share images and video.
8. Weebly – Move over web designers and your high charges. Weebly is a very useful tool for designing web sites and blogs. You can create a weebly site in minutes with their drag and drop functions. Even my 6 year old designed her own traffic tips site. You can also design the website on weebly, and then copy the code and host it with your own webhost.
9. Google Docs – This is a very quick way of sharing , editing and reading documents without downloading them to your computer.
10. Primopdf – Totally free pdf creation tool and also a great free alternative to adobe acrobat.
11. Firefox browser and extensions – Firefox is a browser used by serious online marketers. Apart from the fact that it is very fast in loading time, it also has so many plugins that will make life easier for you.
12. Skype – Skype is an online instant messenger that lets you communicate with people via voice, text or video in real time. It also has supporting plugins for recording conversations. This comes in very handy if you care conducting audio interviews.
13. WordPress – Super power blog publishing platform. You can either have a blog on the wordpress network, or host the blog on your own server. Whichever route you go, wordpress is still super duper in the area of publishing information.

There are many more free tools that will greatly help you in publishing your information online. However, I have started with these to get you up and running with creating your on information products with zero cost and professional results. The only thing stopping you is..you!