Make Your Stories Stand Out With Awesome Images - For FREE

Why having an amazing photo matters?

Daily growth of number of posts on steemit (source)

Steemit is growing rapidly. With tens of thousands of new posts daily, you need a way to make that amazing story about your puppy stand out! There are three ways to make your content more noticeable:

be famous - yeah right
write an appealing title - more on this later
have an awesome image that stands out - even if you're not a hot girl :D

Let's face it. Not everyone is able to make popular content. Even if you do, it will probably get ignored in the sea of steemit stories. Even if the text is amazing, and you know many people would read it, you still got to 'force' them into clicking on that awesome title.

The easiest way is to make the thumbnail compelling, and that's what I'm going to show you in this post!

Canva - a place for any regular Joe who wants to create awesome thumbnails

How I made the thumbnail for this post

Let's get started with creating a thumbnail.

On Canva you can choose the design type you're working on. Some of the categories include:

Maybe they'll add steemit soon, but until they do, I usually choose "Facebook Post" since it's a similar format.

Then we choose from MANY different finished layouts:

After we choose a layout, we can click on any element of the image and edit/move/delete text and images. Also for images we can add special filters, and you can set transparency for each element. There's a bunch of fonts and effects, the UI is pretty simple!

So let's do something like this:

Pretty powerful, isn't it? You have a total control over every element and it's pretty simple to figure out how everything works.

So where's the catch? The thing about Canva is that some elements are "premium". In other words, you have to pay to use them. Good news is that most of those are just the default images in templates.

That can also be bad news if you don't have a photo collection you could use, and finding a good stock photo can be pretty painful.

Adding a top quality stock photo for background

So, where can you find a top quality stock photos you can use for your thumbnails? I've personally used photos from these collections, and they're more than amazing. Don't trust me, check them out yourself:

For the bigger list of similar websites see this link.

When we find a photo we want, we just upload it and drag it on the image we're creating!

We applied a filter and our image is ready.

Now just click on "Download" button in the header and you'll get your photo!

There it is, ready for our awesome posts!

P.S. If you enjoyed this post, you might like the one where I described my productivity system that helped me with time organization when there's a lot at stake. Please check it out here.

Also, since I'm an anarchist, if you're into that kind of stuff, feel free to read my first steemit post.