Tag Archives: URL

Get Traffic Adding URLs to Avatars

Welcome back to another edition of Traffic Tuesday with ThreeMoneyMethods.com!

I wanted to show you today in this video something I learned from James Martell, he’s a friend and a very smart marketer.

One of the things he talked about was taking the images that you use for all of these different social networking sites you are a part of and actually putting a web address in them. And I thought that’s kind of an interesting idea, never tried it before, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I changed out mine on my personal Facebook page, I changed it out so that it included the URL CarrieandJonathan.com which is our site where we do all of our travel stuff.

It was fascinating! The day I changed it out I got four comments from people and our web traffic actually increased on CarrieandJonathan from people who had been friends in high school, people who were former students – I used to teach German and theater, you may not know that, but former students who said, “Hey, I’ve never seen your CarrieandJonathan site, that’s pretty cool!”

It worked here so I went and changed out my Twitter profile too; Twitter only allows you to have smaller images, but you can look at this close enough to see our domain name in the image there.

So what I wanted to do is show you real quick how we did this.

There’s a bunch of different free image creators online; I think you can just Google “free image creator” and you’d find a bunch. What I’m going to do is actually do it inside of Photoshop because I’m familiar with Photoshop.

But if you don’t have Photoshop, just Google “free image creator;” and you should be able to create a little avatar or a custom logo here for yourself in a few different sizes.

What we’re going to do is actually create it in five different sizes. I’m going to go “create a new image” here and we’re going to start off with it in 250 by 250 (pixels); most of these sites have square avatar images. Some of them have rectangles but the vast majority of them are in square image sizes, so we’re going to make the width and the height equal. We’ll go ahead and click “ok” here.

So I now have my image; unfortunately it’s not fitting up with the box here, but you kind of get the idea. What we’re going to do is – maybe I’ll make it really simple and I would just put some text in here. We’re going to make one today for Three Money Methods. So I’m going to go ahead and put some text in here. You can see it’s overflowing the image there, so I’m going to have to make it smaller; so I’m just getting my formatting here all squared away.

We’re going to make this just a little bigger. This really isn’t intended to be a Photoshop class; if you aren’t good at this, you can just hire somebody on Elance to create this kind of stuff for you. But it is a good skill to have and if you don’t have this kind of software, at least you’ll know what to do to have someone do this kind of work for you.

We’re just going to go ahead and make this image – so I’m going to spare you most of the details of me creating this image because you can learn to do this on your own; this is really about traffic.

But basically the idea is you get an image setup that actually includes your web address. You want to make it really, really, really clear when it’s this big size because you’re going to size it down to where it’s very small so that people will actually be able to come back to your website here

I paused the video – you can probably tell that – because it’s a different size here, a little bigger and also because we’re more zoomed in or more done with the image here. But basically we’ve created an avatar image, this one is 250×250 (pixels). So I’m going to go ahead and save this and I’m going to save it for me inside of Photoshop here and I’m going to save it as a 250×250 image/

I’m going to put it inside of my Three Money Methods folder here and we will call this “avatar-image-250-250.” I’m going to save this as a Photoshop file and then I’m going to save it again as a JPG because that’s the file type that most sites accept. Occasionally, you’ll run into somebody that accepts a GIF and not a JPG, a G-I-F file and not a J-P-G file, but for the most part, people just accept the JPG file more often. So we’re going to go ahead and save this as a JPG here – it doesn’t need to be ridiculously high quality, we’ll put it at 55 there and we’ll go ahead and save that.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to resize this image; so instead of it being 250×250, it’s going to be 200×200. I just want to check it out and make sure everything is still pretty visible here – yes, looks good! So I’m going to go ahead and save this; by the way, this is the Facebook size, 200×200. So we’re going to save this as “avatar-image-200-200” and we’ll save it as a JPG. Then we’re going to go “image-image size” and I’m going to save it as 120×120, so we’ll have one that is that size. Now this is getting a little harder to see, but you can see it, so I’m not going to worry about changing the size of things here just yet, although we will as it gets smaller here. But we’ll go ahead and save this as “avatar-image-120-120” and we’ll save it as a JPG.

The reason for all these different sizes is different websites will only accept different sizes of image avatars. For example, when I showed you Twitter over here, Twitter only accepts a relatively small file of 50×50; I think that’s the size that Twitter accepts. So in order to get yours down to that size and make it still visible, you have to make it 50×50 or 75×75 or 80×80; I’m not exactly sure what their avatar image size is.

But we’ll go ahead and go “image-resize” – you just want a bunch of different sizes so that it works on a bunch of different websites for you. I’m going to go ahead and put this at 80×80 and now, it’s really too hard to see. Unfortunately, it’s just become too difficult to read really anything on here. So I’m going to try and clean it up a little bit so I can actually see the domain name down here for just this text. Just by turning off the drop shadow, it becomes much easier to read what it actually is, so I’m going to go ahead and click “ok.” That’s really good enough for me at this point, just for purposes of this video, we’re going to go ahead and say that that’s good enough. I’ll go ahead and go “file-save as” the 80×80 JPG. Then there is an option for a 50×50; I just don’t know, unless your domain name is like just 10 characters long or something how you get it to be readable in that size of an image. But we’re going to try here just for purposes of the video. I do, on the domain name, “3” Money Methods with a number 3 instead of a t-h-r-e-e; so that becomes easier to separate this out here and gives me a little more space, although it’s still going to be hard to read. So I’m going to go ahead and size this down so that it’s 50×50 and then we’ll see how we can make it more visible in that size range.

So we’re going to go 50×50 and as you can see it becomes very difficult to see it at all; so we’re going to try to get it so we can see it, but I don’t really worry too much about it because with the 50×50 size there’s not much you can do to make it really legible. But you can see it just becomes really difficult to make it so it’s even legible at all at that size.

So what I might do here is get rid of the “.com” on the end and that gives me a little more room to stretch this out, just a little bit; and I think that’s as good as its going to get. So we’ll just leave it like that: “3MoneyMethods.” And I’ll go ahead and do a “file-save as” and this will be our 50×50 image.

The nice thing about doing this is that it’s just another way to bring traffic back to you because people actually see that image in your profile when they’re looking at your posts or your things that you’ve put on Facebook or Twitter or MySpace or wherever and you get another opportunity to “brand them” with your logo or your name in the actual image itself. We always have this saying, “A picture equals a thousand words;” well, here’s your picture!  And now we have all these different files sizes that we can use. This is our original and then we’ve got this one that we made which is much smaller. We can post these now onto different profiles and get traffic that way having put an image with a URL in it.

That’s just a quick little tip and again I got that from James Martell. There’s a link, if you’re on the Three Money Methods website, where you can go to actually learn more from James Martell. Just a great guy and a great affiliate marketer! You can definitely learn a lot from him.

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