A Professional Cover Photo For Your Facebook page

This is a Guest Post Mini Challenge for the Biannual Blogathon Bash event. Anyone is welcome to read this post and try the challenge but only blogathon participants are eligible to win prizes for completing it. It's not too late to join!

You can read more about the guest author at the end.

Add a professional and amazing cover photo to your Facebook page

Facebook is the largest social network on the planet so far, it has over a billion registered users and it is a great resource to promote an online or offline business. The amount of people that can be reached is huge and chances are that your audience will grow just by creating a Facebook business page. Even when Facebook is so powerful we still need to do our job in order to reach as many people as possible, and one of the big things that we can invest our time and resources on is in creating a professional and amazing cover photo for the page. If you want to know why this is important as well as how to do it I invite you to stay tuned and learn more about it.

You know the saying: An image is worth a thousand words, and in the case of the cover photo it could be worth more than just words. A cover image is perfect for sending the right message to the right audience, it also allows us to have fun while creating it and to the visitor while seeing it; it all depends on what we want to share and how. A cover photo is a great piece of digital land to describe your business in a very creative, interactive, and compelling way so that people not only can but actually want to learn more about you. In order to stay on the safe side there are some guidelines that must be followed while creating the cover photo.

Something that you should be aware of is that the cover photo must not have any call to action, offer, product description, or URL. The cover photo is intended to describe the nature of your business and if these guidelines are not followed, Facebook has the right to delete your page without previous notification. It would be really sad to invest a big chunk of time, effort, and dedication on the page just to lose it because of something that Facebook clearly disclosed. The best way to learn more about Facebook rules is to actually visit their site and make sure to follow them.

How should a Facebook page cover photo be created?

As I mentioned before, a cover photo is a place designated to explain the nature of your business in a creative and compelling way. This means that if your business is about photography you can definitely create an image where your skills as photographer are displayed., Also it is a great idea to include a short sentence describing the photography business. The idea is to display as creatively as possible a beautiful and professional image that explains the nature or the motive behind your business or your cause. This cover photo should have a compelling message so that people can't resist being drawn to it.

Ok I get it, but I am not a graphics designer… What can I do?

Having an amazing cover photo is neither difficult nor expensive. If you don't know how to design your own image it is a good idea to outsource this task and hire someone to do it. A professionally designed image can be very cheap and here I want to talk to you about two places where you can find professional designers that can help you with this; it will depend on your requirements and budget to determine which option is the best one.

• Elance.com: This place is an amazing source for hiring professionals of any field. A good graphics designer here can charge you anything between 75 to 150 USD depending on what you want. This place is really helpful as it allows you to fund the project without putting your money at risk. , Once the designer sees the project funded he can start working on it. , The funds are released by you at the moment that you decide that you got what you asked for. Elance allows you to see the feedback of a specific professional so that you can determine if he or she is a good option for your project or not.
• Fiverr.com: It is impressive the amount of people that are willing to do something for five USD, and fortunately one of those things is to design a professional and simple image for your cover photo. Fiverr works a little bit different than Elance as you first pay and then get the product. The money is secured as well and can be refunded if you don't get what you want. Fiverr allows you to see the feedback of a specific vendor so that you can decide based on data if that seller is a good choice or not.

There are more places like Elance and Fiverr, these are just two that are very famous and that personally I can recommend.

The challenge: Start to brainstorm your cover photo and get started on creating it

Now that you know how easy, affordable, and important is to create a custom, professional, creative, and compelling cover photo, I want to invite you to create or have one designed for your brand or business. If you already have a predesigned logo it is a good idea to keep those colors and style to increase the branding of your page. In the event that you don't know how to create the image by yourself there are other people willing to do it for as low as five dollars and it will depend on your budget and requirements how much you will invest on it.

Comment below to tell me if you have redone your cover photo (and you can include a link to your Facebook page to show it off) or if you want to change it, what you are envisioning and who you will have do it (yourself, one of the sites mentioned above or another designer.)

Don't forget to grow the conversation and enrich the topic by leaving comments or questions here; we are more than willing to help you. Also if you already had your image designed following this guide let us know how it was and what your recommendations are for those who want to do it but are still hesitating a little bit. To Your Online Success!

About the author: Jose Lozano is fan of creating Facebook business pages; he knows that this social network offers a very valuable piece of digital real estate that must not be ignored. Recently he created a Facebook page for his site about RC toys where he enjoys posting content such as a CX2 Blade RC helicopter review and tips for people wanting to buy the mQX quadcopter, Jose has seen that Facebook is a great place to share this content as other hobbyists can reach him as well.