TOP 12 Tools For Your Small Biz WIN!

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another video. Today I want to talk about one of my favorite tools to run my business and it's called 99designs. I've highlighted here on my blog of my favorite tools, so I'll just go down and find it here. And what you can use 99designs for is basically anything that's design-related for your business. So if you need a logo, a website, business card, t-shirt, banner ad, whatever it is, any kind of design, it's a great place to check out. And one of the main reasons why I like it is you're not actually paying for the work until you get a finished product. So most of the time when you're working with designers, you're working with artists, right? And you can look at their past portfolio, see what they've done, but you're not quite sure what you're going to get for your project. So 99designs, you're only paying for a final product. Which is fantastic for an entrepreneur. So I'll show you here what I've done in the past, some of the projects I've worked on. My contest here. So here are 3 that I've done. So I had a website header, a logo and PowerPoint design, and an infographic artist that I've hired. So in the first one, a website header, I was looking for someone to, you know, make a new design for me at the top. And I had 12 entries and I didn't like any of them and I didn't end up paying for the winning design. So there was no risk to me except a little bit of time in kind of launching that project. The logo and PowerPoint design and the infographic artist, I did end up hiring. And so again, you're only paying when you get a final design that you actually like and are happy with and going to implement into your business, which again is fantastic. So I'll show you an example if I click on my infographic artist. So what I wanted to do here was get some complex content, some articles, and turn them into cartoons via an infographic and wanted someone to help me do that. And I had a winning bid here by The Lion King. So what happens here is I'll post my description and I said I had $154, that was my bid. I had 25 people who entered into it. Basically what will happen is you'll see this as you go through. People will start submitting designs. This is my winning design, and you can see all sorts of other designs that people submit. What you can do as you see these designs is leave feedback. You can give them a star rating out of 5, and you can also say, "I really like this design, but I'd love to see it with an orange top." Then they can come back and give it to you with an orange top. There is a period of time we can communicate with the designer to say what you like and what you don't like. And then at the end, if you do like one, you can pick, you know, your winning designer, award them the money. But just before that, you can also run a poll. And so you can see here you're running a poll, one person has voted, or create new poll. So what you can do is you can take your top 5 designs and maybe you're not sure because you've looked at them so much and you're not quite sure which one you go with, you can create a poll, it'll give you a link, you can send it to your friends or your customers or partners or staff or whoever you want to send it to for feedback. and they can vote on it. So you can say, "Here are my top 5 designs. I want a new infographic. I want a new logo. What do you guys think?" And they can all give you their feedback. They can leave comments and vote stars and tell you which ones, you know, they like the best to maybe give you some guidance as to which one you should pick. Once that's done, again, you can then pick your winning design, hire the person. If there's any final tweaks, they can make it for you, and you have your final design. And again, the best thing about it is you're paying for a winning design. So, you know, I didn't quite know what to expect. In fact, when I had this infographic project, I had an article that was Top 10 Reasons to Partner with Someone, and I wanted to turn it into a cartoon figure, and you know, people could easily have submitted their bios and previous work, but again, didn't really know what I would end up getting, and if I would like it or not. And so through 99designs, you're only paying for a result, which is a fantastic way for an entrepreneur to be able to get some security and knowledge that you're gonna be happy with the end result. So I encourage you to go check it out for any kind of graphic work that you need done. There's a lot of great designers here, really talented, and they can help you grow your business. So if you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up. I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback as well. If you want to leave a comment below the video, and stay tuned for the next episode.