New tutorials and more

Happy Monday! Not my usual day to send a newsletter but life has been so busy with work lately that I grab time where I can. Can you relate?

In this issue:

• Easy clip art tutorials in Affinity

• Niche idea of the week: exploring gratitude products

• Custom frames for Canva

• Pinterest marketing academy

Recent Video Tutorials

As someone with minimal artistic talent, one thing I love about Affinity is the ability to make simple images from just shapes and maybe a line or two.

In this first tutorial, I demonstrate how to create 3 different simple flowers.

Then, using shapes and pushing a few nodes around, learn to make this cat. Use this to decorate kid’s printables, or remove the color and turn it into a simple coloring image.

These techniques also work to make your own clip art for patterns and because they are vector, you can re-scale and re-color to your hearts content.

From the Blog Archive

Read: Create a Kids 1-100 number printable with Affinity Publisher

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What I’m loving: I got a great deal on the Better Sheets lifetime access recently and this bookmarklet is transforming my research. There is an enhanced version called Better Newsletters for curation as well. The bookmarklet creates a Google sheet, a webform, and shows you how to pin that to your browser bookmarks. Visit a site and push the bookmark and the name of the site and URL plus any notes you want to add go straight to your sheet. Such a timesaver.

To access Better Sheets monthly or annually click here.(not an affiliate link)

Learn Pinterest marketing for free straight from the source. I had no idea that Pinterest had their own library of mini-courses. Many of these are geared towards ads and e-com, but with recent Google updates, I think making paid traffic work might be the future.

From Yadsia, this series of creating Canva frames to re-sell. So far she has covered Midjourney & Powerpoint, as well as how to sell them with commercial rights. And if you missed it, I shared how to create custom frames in Affinity a couple of months ago, you can watch that here.

Rather use OPC (other people’s clip art)? Get 1 year of Creative Fabrica for $47 and access all graphics, fonts and classes. Check it out here (affiliate link)

Random Musings:

A few days ago, we had beautiful clear skies and an amazing aurora borealis display (if you took a picture with a long shutter exposure).

I’ve never seen the northern lights, but I really didn’t expect anything much so I went to bed. Mistake.

I awoke to my Facebook feed full of incredible images. I stayed up Saturday night, but nothing much happened. As the weekend wore on, I was really regretting not making the effort on Friday night.

Sometimes we do this in business too. We drag our feet and later regret it. I can think of many times where I felt like an opportunity seemed too good to be true, or too saturated to start (like low content books on Createspace/KDP in 2017, lol) and it only truly became saturated a few years later. Hindsight is 20/20 right?

But the past is the past and we can only look to what we can make happen in the future. And while FOMO is real, it is usually instilled in us by people selling the dream.

Because I can tell you, if something were “hot” and had an audience of hungry buyers, I wouldn’t be sharing it unless 1) I had no time or interest in pursuing it myself or 2) it had started cooling off.

Which means that a lot of people selling these hot methods make more selling the “method” than doing the thing.

I still believe that creativity and exploration combined with persistence are the secret weapon. The people that tend to be the most successful are the innovators and early copycats.

For example, in the low content world we have moved from no content (notebooks) to journals (low content) to puzzles and coloring books (medium content) as each book type became saturated.

The early adopters saw success but new people releasing notebooks are unlikely to get any traction without a strong marketing plan/budget.

I can also say that following the pack usually involves hustle. Hustle can be exhausting. When you are creating something original, you are not chasing competition, and you have no copycats until you launch.

So, instead of regretting the past, what will you create and innovate tomorrow?

Until next time,

Catherine