Featured Designer - Kristmess

Featured Designer – Kristmess

I am excited to share a feature on our of great designers at CUDigitals. Let’s learn a little but more about Kristmess Designs!
What is your real name if different than your design name? Kristina Messier
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your family. I was born and raised in England but now live in Montreal, QC in Canada with my husband and we have 3 sons.
How long have you been designing CU products and how did you get started? I think probably as long as I've been selling my  PU kits which will be around 8 years.  I really just sell the pieces I'd have made for my PU kits. I think I started by selling my layered paper templates, back then there was just png overlays available but I found that with the layers they'd be much easier to use so that's why I started to sell them for CU, I guess they took off 'cos everyone does them like that now!
Here are a few of Kristina’s products that you won’t want to miss seeing



Do you design PU products as well? Yes.
What programs do you use to design your products? Photoshop (just recently upgraded to CS6!)
What is your favorite time of the day to design? Night is my favourite time but I rarely get do that these days with having early starts in the mornings with the boys.
Can you give us a great tip for using one of your products to create digital scrapbooking kits? I hope that my layered paper templates are a great way to make things simple for designers when doing their kits, just add colours to the different layers add some texture and, bingo! 

What are a few of your favorite products that you've made? I love my cruise ship template which I recently put into the store. Also my Doodle Flowers Layered Templates

What are your best-selling product? Paisley Paper Templates, Perpetual Calendar Brushes, Doodle Flowers Layered Templates (shown above) and

Do you have plans for your next set of CU products? My next set of CU products will probably be some more paper templates!
What do you love to do when you are not working? Be with my kids playing games!
What is your favorite beverage? My favourite would be a fizzy drink from Ireland called Cidona, but since I can't get that here in Canada I usually drink Pepsi.
If you could learn anything what would it be? Facebook, wish I could figure out how to work that properly!
Kristina has a great sale in her store (40% off) as well as a really wonderful freebie:

 

Designer Sales

Sale Announcements

We have some new sales starting in the store today - don't miss these great deals!

Product Gallery Advertising Tips

Designer Tip – Product Gallery Advertising
DigiScrapAddicts.com has a great offer for advertising your digital scrapbooking products. There is a product gallery where you can post your previews, store links and links to your blog/newsletter/social media for a super low price. Product advertising at DSA not only allows you to post your product previews with descriptions and store links in the gallery but also your new product announcements in the forum. The site is growing and there are new users, Facebook fans and newsletter subscribers every single day who can potentially view your products.
The cost of promoting your products in the gallery and in the forum is incredibly low - just $10 per year. Compared to the cost and effort of maintaining a similar preview gallery on your own site, this deal can’t be beat!
What can product gallery advertising do for you

• Provide a searchable location for your products. If someone searches “Easter” or “picnic” and your product is in the gallery, they can find it better than on a Google search
• Drive traffic to your blog, store, newsletter or fan page in addition to your store. Unlike some store pages, you can post links to your home page, social media etc. so people can connect with you and purchase your designs
• Provide one central location for all your previews if you are selling in more than store.
• Provide a reliable location for your previews - if your store closes, you still have a place to display your products - this can be very helpful when you are searching for a new place to sell
• Promote your free items as well so people can get to know your designs and become paying customers

Signing up is easy and you get instant access to gallery after your payment is processed. Here’s what to do.

1. Create an account if you have not already done so. http://digiscrapaddicts.com/forum/register.php  (You will need to confirm your registration via an email link.)
2. While logged in, go to the Paid Subscription page here - http://digiscrapaddicts.com/forum/payments.php
3. Select the Product Gallery Subscription option.

If you have any questions or issues, please see the contact page for help.

Creative Teams and Social Media

DESIGNER TIP
Did you know your Creative Team can help increase your social media exposure with just one simple step? Facebook uses a rather complicated system of deciding to whom it shows your posts and when. One measure of how it delivers content is how much interaction there is on a post: likes and shares. All your CT needs to do to increase delivery is like, or better yet, share the posts about things like your new releases and sales. If your CT is like me, a lot of their friends are NOT digital scrapbookers, so they might feel like they would not want to share your ads and such. However, I think it is OK and natural for a CT to share an ad and share something like “I got to work with this designer as part of my favorite hobby: digital scrapbooking!” There are many other creative ways to share and a quick e-mail to your team to hit the LIKE button on your page is all it takes to get Facebook to show it to more of the fans that you worked hard to attract.
For more info on the Facebook algorithm, read this article at Fast Feed.

DESIGNER SALES



GET FREE DESIGNER TIPS EVERY WEEKDAY
Do you follow us on Facebook? It’s THE place to get a daily link to business-building tips and resources for your design business. This week there are more resources for you, such as:

• Best WordPress Themes
• Creating Content Pinterest Users will LOVE
• How to Feature Your Most Pinterest-Worthy Posts in Your Sidebar
• How to See If Your Photos Are Being Used On Another Site
• BEAUTIFUL gallery plugin for WordPress › NextGEN Gallery
• Widget to put your Instagram on your blog -- SnapWidge

Follow our page HERE ….and don’t forget to pick up the Fan Freebie


SEE OUR NEW PRODUCTS (and more) ON PINTEREST
If you are on Pinterest, follow the CUDigitals new product board to see the new stuff in store every Monday through Saturday. I have some other boards that are useful for digital scrapbook designers as well:

• color
• social media
• fonts

or see everything HERE.

Using Google Alerts in Your Design Business

DESIGNER TIP

Did you know Google has something called "Alerts”? It’s a way to have the content you’re interested in delivered to your email on a timetable you set (once a day or as it happens). One way you can use this as a digital scrapbooking designers is to set an alert for your design name. Then you can get an email if someone posts public content about you on the web! For instance, if someone blogs about creating a layout with your product and mentions your name, you will get an email with a link to the post and then you can go leave a comment on their blog – I bet you the page creator would appreciate that! If you have a common name like me, you might need to add “digital” or “scrapbooking” at the end. On the alerts page, as you fill in the info, you will get a live preview of the kind of content it will find with your keywords.
Try it out at http://www.google.com/alerts


SALES

New Sales for September

We have a couple of new sales starting in the store today~