Your Ad Here! How to Advertise for Free @ HowToLeaveAcademia

If you are a post-ac or alt-ac entrepreneur, freelancer, or blogger, we want to support your endeavors. Starting now, How To Leave Academia is offering FREE ad spots. Read on for details on snagging your spot, and tips for easily designing an ad for your service.

Click here to read about our advertising options.

Again, advertising is FREE. We have 3 options: premium spots that appear on the left, secondary spots that appear on the right below the slider, and single post spots that will appear at the end of articles. If you want a premium spot, we ask that you contribute content to our blog as a guest post. You get a free, 30-day ad for writing up something helpful for other post-acs -- win/win.

Not sure how to make your own ad?

It's crazy simple to create a little ad, even if you don't have a logo and don't own Photoshop! Here's how. If you're already a Photoshop pro, the Pixlr Advanced option will be great for you. For the rest of us, we'll use Pixlr Express to create this ad.

1. Find an image to be the background.

Upload an image from your computer, or find a good pic and use it's URL. Wikimedia Commons is a great source for royalty-free images, or use a nice headshot. Search google images for something. Here, I searched for "ombre paint" to find a pretty, colorful image that I could work with. Since ads are small, pics with a lot of detail won't look great. Go for something simple and bold.



Save the image to your desktop, or save the url. I recommend saving the image so you can reuse it again if you like it, and make different sized images if you want. When you find an image online, right click and select "view image" and when it opens in a separate tab/window, right click on the image again and select "save image as."

2. Go to pixlr.com and chose Pixlr Express ("efficient"). Upload the image or insert the url.

3. Select "adjustment" and then "crop," and crop the image to your liking. Click "apply."



4. Select "adjustment" and then "resize." This way, you can customize the size of the image to the size of the ad spot. We offer several sizes (see here for details) and today I'll do one that's 200x100. Make sure you click the little toggle that says "keep proportions" so that it is OFF. Click "apply."



5. Now you can have fun. Chose "sticker" to insert images if you want. Play around. But be sure you use the text option to include info about yourself  in a readable way.



6. Click save in the upper left and save it to your desktop. I recommend putting the dimensions of the image in the title.



One final tip: take the time to make your ad in a few dimensions before you close out of Pixlr. You can resave it at different sizes, which is handy.

Tada!