As a designer, you have a responsibility to create useful, easily customizable content for your customers on PosterMyWall. This includes refraining from things that may prove to be an annoyance to customers, and that hurt your sales. Here’s what you need to avoid:
Using irrelevant tags
Tags let PosterMyWall customers find relevant templates. Your templates need to be tagged so that they describe the template accurately, or are related to relevant search terms. For example, the flyer below could easily be used for a music festival, a nightclub party or a house music concert. 
Each template on PosterMyWall is scored. A higher score means the template will be found higher up on the page. One way your templates gain score is when customers interact with them, such as by customizing and purchasing downloads or prints. Adding incorrect tags to your template means customers who have no intention of using it may view it. This affects its score adversely, pushing your template lower in the page.
When tagging your template, you have to make sure they describe the template accurately. There are multiple ways to go about this:
- Describe the design style (Is it modern, minimalist, vintage, pastel, maximalist etc)
- Its use (a party invite, concert flyer, bar advert etc)
- Any particular niche within a theme (charity event, electronics dealer small business, shop’s grand opening).
- Keep it relevant to the overall theme. For example, a grand opening flyer should also have tags for the overall theme or audience it caters too, like small business owners or restaurants depending on the content of the template itself.
What can go wrong?
Adding irrelevant tags often means low customizations and sales for your template. Stuffing your templates with irrelevant tags may get you an initial bump in views but will adversely affect your template ranking in the long run. Your template will not achieve the potential it can reach with relevant tags.
The reason for this is simple. If a customer is searching for advertisement templates for his new clinic, he’ll simply ignore a flyer template for a nail salon. Templates that are ignored get indexed lower into the searches until they become hard to find.
Adding to multiple/wrong categories
Most templates neatly fit into one category, whereas some templates are not a perfect fit in any category. For example, a skiing template could be added to the ‘Sports’ as well as ‘Winter’ category (it has a ‘Winter sports’ sub-category) since there is no category dedicated to skiing yet.
Your template should generally be under one category. There are exceptions to this rule, like a Halloween menu will be relevant to both the Halloween Flyers and Menu categories.
Pick categories that fit most closely with the template’s theme. For example, a Happy Hour template will go under the Bar category rather than the Event or Party categories.
What can go wrong?
Adding your template to many, or unrelated categories means many people will view the template, but few will actually use it. For example, an Easter egg hunt invitation will just get ignored in Church related searches. The template will eventually get indexed lower into the searches because of low scores so even fewer people will find it.
Not sure where to place your template? Send us a message and we’ll advise you.
Poor quality designs
People come to PosterMyWall to create enticing visuals for all kinds of commercial and personal projects. As a designer, it is your responsibility to provide high quality, easily customizable and meaningful design templates to your audience.
How do you make good quality templates? Use the Designing Resources in the Help Center for in depth guides to designing templates that sell well, and provide good value to your customers. Here are the basics of getting your designs right:
- Know your target audience. Teachers, business executives, car mechanics or small business marketers are all looking for something. Make sure your templates fulfil their need.
- Once you know what you want to design, look for inspiration online, such as the PosterMyWall Gallery, Behance or Pinterest.
- Now that you have a better idea about aesthetic designs and your target audience, you can start by creating your own unique design.
- Publish your design. While you’re at it, you can also add variety to your templates with minimal effort.
What can go wrong?
Poor quality designs come in many forms, some of these are:
- A design published as a simple background, or series of images with no clear purpose.
- Text content is used lazily. This often means sprinkling the design with the default ‘add text’ box, or using ‘lipsum lorem’ content instead of meaningful text.
- Designs overloaded with content, making customizing a chore.
- Design elements that cannot be customized. This includes uploading a finished flyer as an image or background. These designs are useless to anyone looking to customize the template.
- Unnecessarily adding premium stock content (by Getty Images) in your template.
Creating designs similar to each other
Templates that stand out from others tend to rank better on searches and gallery pages..
Sometimes designers may choose to design multiple templates that are very similar to each other, save for a few insignificant changes.
Creating templates that are too similar to one another can occur due to a few reasons, such as:
- Simply resizing the template before publishing
- Creating several copies of a single template
- Tweaking one item in the design before publishing another copy
Note that variations of a template such as the above will not be shown as individual templates in the gallery. They will be displayed in the preview dialogs for other, similar templates only.
What can go wrong?
The repercussions for creating designs which are too similar to each other are:
- A reduction in sales, as customers are likely to pick unique designs over copied templates
- Templates that are similar to others in the gallery
However, you can avoid these severe repercussions that hurt your sales. The solution to this problem is to improve your designs by creating unique customizable templates with graphics, colors, layout designs that are unique to that template.
By creating each of your templates uniquely, you will increase your sales as well as the popularity of your designs overall.