Where does creativity come from? As an artist, graphic designer, business person, advertiser, and armchair philosopher, this is a question I have asked myself many times. And I am formulating an answer, which I’ll test out on you momentarily.

In a previous blog post I shared about “The Perfect Campaign,” and the four essentials that are required to achieve success in online marketing.

These four essentials are:

  1. WebsiteA WordPress blog for communicating your story to your followers. Also home for all your ad pages.
  2. CreativeArt/Photo/Text creation and processing tools for designing and building ad pages and illustrating blog posts.
  3. Autoresponder – For sequencing a series of emails with links back to your blog; and for sending out “broadcast” messages to all your subscribers.
  4. TrackingCounting the “hits” (page views) and “conversions” (clicks and form submissions) your ad pages achieve, and where the traffic is coming from.

In that blog post I introduced you to my WordPress web hosting business — Oakley Studio. I love WordPress, and I would love to be your webmaster to help you make WordPress the core marketing hub for your own online business.

GET CREATIVE

Successful profitable online marketing requires that you have robust, unlimited, reliable and fast web hosting, with your own domain name. That’s essential — but it’s just the beginning.

The next essential is Creative. You need a collection of tools to produce “The Perfect Campaign.” I’ll tell you what my collection consists of, but the exact tools do not matter, so long as you are able to use them to create effective advertising.

As a professional graphic designer working for several different types of businesses over the years, I have come to rely on Adobe Photoshop for image processing. Most of the images I use in advertising are photos, and Photoshop is great for making modifications to photos; adjusting color, combining and blending images, cropping and scaling, etc. I also use Photoshop for some kinds of illustration work. Images typically go from camera or stock to Photoshop, and then to Adobe Fireworks, to add text (and text styling, scaling, and positioning) and then I export to Adobe Dreamweaver for constructing the final web page. I use a plain text editor to do any final work on the HTML code.

Photoshop, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver are professional tools that take a long time to master, so I don’t recommend these to anyone who is not already a professional graphic designer. (Adobe “Creative Suite” is also expensive.) So Photoshop is not the best choice for anyone who wants to just construct an ad page and get it out there.

GET ADKREATOR

The quickest way I’ve found to get your creative up and running is to use an online service that is focused on making great ads. Let’s take a look at AdKreator.

Create your free account, log in to AdKreator, and create your first ad page free.  You can have one free ad page for as long as you want. Use that ad page to promote your favorite PTC and attract direct referrals.

AdKreator provides a huge library of images and hundreds of different fonts, and it’s really fun to see how you can combine images, backgrounds, shapes and text to grab attention and make a point.

I did this! My first AdKreator ad page.

My First AdKreator Ad

Here are my recommendations as you go about creating your first original ad page:

  1. Focus on your message – What do you want to say in as few words as possible to get others to join your favorite PTC? Create an emotional connection (happiness, lust, fear, friendship, pain, joy, sadness, achievement) and address a specific need (money, time, convenience, problem/solution). Now you are thinking like an advertiser!
  2. Provide a focal image – Represent your message with a striking image and avoid competing or contradictory images.
  3. Anchor your ad with a big headline – And make an emotional impact.
  4. Give it color – Select colors that harmonize. Not too many different colors. Choose colors that direct focus to your image and your message.
  5. Framing – Use part of your ad page for branding, and use it consistently for all your advertising. (We’ll be studying branding a lot more next month.)
  6. Add personality – Anticipate that people will want to know more about you. You can use that to create mystique, suggest your story, and pique interest.
  7. Always include a CALL TO ACTION – Tell your viewers what to do next. Do this! Click here. Sign up. Join Now. Be clear about it — there should be no question what must happen next.

Did you ever think so much could go into one little ad? This is your creative at work — when the tools, and the ideas in your brain are working together to create something totally unique, that the world has never seen before.

AdKreator is a fully equipped online graphical workshop for creating your own unique ad pages. You will create something amazing, something that grabs attention, that you will love to throw more traffic at because it gets signups better than ever.

Of course every PTC already provides banners and splash pages you can use to advertise. By all means use them, it’s the easiest way to go… but the canned ad pages won’t help to identify you as a personality worth following. And when you use the canned ad pages, you will be directly competing with everyone else who is also using them. But you know that already, right?

Create your first AdKreator page, and then point your traffic resources at it. Use the Traffic Exchanges and Safe Lists to show your ad page to thousands of people.

And when you have your own AdKreator page that is getting you signups in your key PTCs, add a comment below and show us what you’ve done.

WHERE THE PICTURES COME FROM

One more thing about AdKreator, you can import your own pictures! Any GIF or JPG image can be uploaded to AdKreator to use in your ad. Any picture you draw, or snap a photo of, can be used in your ad. I sometimes use screen grabs to illustrate something important, or to capture images of the PTC brands I am pitching. But beware you can’t just use any image you find on the internet. Nearly all images/pictures/photos are owned by other people who retain rights over how their images are used. Avoid a stupid lawsuit over unauthorized use of other people’s images.

Instead use royalty-free stock image libraries and be prepared to pay for what you use. My favorite image library is Dreamstime, a stock service with hundreds of thousands of images to choose from, an easy keyword search and very affordable pricing. (They have a huge free image catalog too.) You only pay for what you use. Most pictures cost just a few bucks and you can use them forever.

WHERE DOES CREATIVITY COME FROM?

Creativity comes from mind. Creativity originates in the mind. I see it show up in my mind and I see evidence that it happens in other people’s minds too. So creativity is something that has it’s origins in thought processes. More specifically, creativity is a new thought that arose from combining two or three previous thoughts, or ideas, in some new way. I have never observed a creative idea to bloom in my head without some other thoughts preceding and connected to it.

It appears that thoughts are the organic soup out of which creativity emerges. Thoughts — a rich mix of memories, words, concepts, ideas, images, emotions, and beliefs — are constantly churning inside our heads. Every now and then two thoughts knock about together in a way that something NEW pops out. That is how creativity happens.

FROM MIND TO MATTER

So creativity arises from processes happening IN MIND. But if creativity never moved from mind to matter, it could never be shared with someone else, and while you might enjoy a creative thought yourself, it does nothing more unless you can turn it into something to share with others.

Fire up your creative juices and get going with Dreamstime and AdKreator.

The perfect ad in your imagination is poised at your fingertips, waiting to become real.

2 Comments on From Mind to Matter

  1. Kathy Clouse says:

    I never thought about being creative, the processes that go into producing what your mind is imaging. And, I am not very creative in myself, I can look at others works and be awed by it, then I sit down and try writing, making an ad and go blank. You are great Peter, I wish I also had that spark somewhere in me, could make it travel to my brain, then show itself on paper.

    Once again, thanks for sharing your world, I enjoy all your posts.

  2. Tame Bear says:

    Kathy, you really should try it! Anybody can be creative, by combining two thoughts, and then doing what you can to make it REAL. AdKreator is a great place to create your own ads, and Dreamstime is a HUGE library for royalty-free images for your ads and blog pages. You get better by doing.

    So… what do you want to sell? Think about it, think of images to convey an idea about it, and build a unique ad that no one has ever seen before. Make something that gets people to pause and go HMMM… or WOW! Your own creative ads will ALWAYS outperform the standard made-for-you affiliate pages. Give it a try and see.

    And one more thing. If you want to have someone look at your ad before you start running it in the TEs, Safelists, and PTCs, feel free to ask me. :) I will always applaud you for doing something of your own, and if I have suggestions I think will help make it convert better, I will tell you, nice as I can.

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