To be successful on Instagram, you really need to up your graphic design game and create professional looking images. You might get away with some clumsy or even funny looking pictures on Instagram stories, but the images on your profile must be inspiring, creative and should stand out to be able to capture your customers’ attention. After all, you want followers that are actual human beings, not bots.
If you don’t have a designer’s degree don’t worry, here’s a quick guide on how to use Canva for free and create posts that will hopefully gain a bunch of new followers, likes, and comments.
With Canva you can do a lot of marketing materials, from blog graphics to ebooks, flyers, brochures, banners and so on. But we will focus on how to create Instagram posts.
First, you need to create a Canva account for free. Next, choose the Instagram post from the templates in the Dashboard.
You’ll notice there are a lot of free templates and layouts to choose from. They also have free backgrounds or some at the cost of $1. They also offer free high-quality photos you can use in the “Elements” tab, “Free Photos” section.
The best way though is to use your own images or free images available on websites like pexels, unsplash, pixabay or other similar websites.
So, go to uploads and upload your own images.
How to choose your images:
- try choosing high-quality images that are relevant to the text you want to add on top of it. This will make you look more professional and thoughtful.
- choose images that are similar and go well with each other. Try creating a theme or a story on your Instagram account. You don’t want to confuse your followers with too different concepts or too busy backgrounds.
- if your purpose is to create quoted images choose photos with a lot of space where the text will be placed. You want it to be easy to read, so try avoiding too busy backgrounds with too many elements or colors.
Once you found your images and uploaded to Canva, you can then add them to the white canvas and start creating your Instagram post template. You’ll notice that you can apply filters and edit the image if you want. Or, simply just add some blur to create more contrast with the text that will be added next.
If you want to create quoted Instagram posts you’ll need some good resources for the quotes. Here is a list of websites where you can find interesting quotes and inspirational content to use in your posts:
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We all know that quotes work really well on Instagram. Of course, it depends on your niche and the type of Instagram account that you have. But even so, you can add one quote that is relevant to your niche every once in a while to mix things up a bit.
Keep a cheat sheet with all the quotes you want to use on your Instagram posts. Now go to your Instagram post template and add the quote you want to your previously chosen background.
You can use the templates they offer if that makes sense to your image and text, or you can edit it. You can change the font, the size, and the color. You can choose different sizes or different fonts to make it stand out more. Just use your creativity. If you need inspiration for this go to Pinterest and search for quotes. You’ll see that with just some typography tricks you can create more visual interest in your images and they’ll look more professional at the same time.
You can also create photo collages with Canva. For this, go to Elements, choose “Grids” and select the layout you want.
Next, go to “Free Photos” and choose photos for your collage. You can use these free photos for your backgrounds as well.
You can also create templates and save them to be used later for similar posts.
Bonus Tip: You can invest some time and create 50 or 100 Instagram posts like these, save them in a Dropbox folder and choose this folder in your JARVEE campaigns as a source with the “Monitor Folder” feature. This way when you will have new Instagram posts added to this folder, they will be automatically added to your campaign and shared on your Instagram account.
Jolie says
I can’t believe that I haven’t heard about Canva before! Awesome stuff, thank you so much for the tips.
I was paying for poster design and this is something that I can to on my own.
Love your blog Jarvee.
Mark Jones says
This is awesome after paying a lot for graphics design now i can do it for my business free
Shweta says
I have bookmarked this it’s a great guide Thankyou
Amy says
Is there a way to make a post and share it across all social media or do I have to recreate the same post 4 times? FB, Twitter, IG, Pinterest?
Thanks so much
Bruce says
Of course there is. What you need to do is create destination list that contains your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest account and add it to campaign. In When to publish tab of your campaign make sure you check the option “Publish a post list item on all selected destinations”. This way each of your posts in Posts lists will be published on all social profiles that you have added to destination list.
Johana says
I make my instagram post images in Photoshop but I also tried online tools like Be Funky and MockoFun. They are much more easy to use because they have all kinds of predefined elements, texts, etc!
Linda says
I’m a little confused on how to take the post I’ve created and post it to Instagram. Where you have mentioned create a destination list and add it to the campaign. Where do I do that and how do I post to these accounts?
Adam says
Please contact our support for more information about this.