Is Your Blog Suffering Due To Shortage Of Images?
Visual content is in the top five most important aspects of your blog. Are you giving images enough attention?
If a picture is worth a thousand words, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Instagram is increasingly supplanting blogging as the du jour method of self-expression. With the blogosphere full to bursting with would-be writers, photography is rising to the top as an alternative method of connecting with other people.
Of course, blogging will never die, even if some of its novelty value has been eroded by the sheer volume of content that’s out there. Writing remains one of the ultimate methods of communication, and writing well is a true gift – not just knowing when to use the Oxford comma, but knowing how to clearly describe thoughts and opinions. However, there seems little dispute that a blog with images will be more memorable and likely to become popular than a text-only entry. That’s particularly true for anything sales-related, where seeing a product on-screen will be far more appealing to potential customers than reading a lengthy article about it.
Why Use Images?
There is plenty of evidence about the uplift in engagement when blogs include images, with figures ranging between 22% and 94% – depending on the blog. Facebook posts with pictures receive twice as many comments as those that don’t, and there are similar statistics for the likes of Twitter and other social media platforms. Original images are particularly effective, rather than Shutterstock/Getty downloads or Flickr photos with Creative Commons licences. However, just as some people find writing very challenging, others couldn’t take a good photo if they tried. A stock image will be better than nothing providing it’s directly relevant to the content or deliberately divergent from it, such as a science blog running a picture of a fluffy kitten as an antidote to a lengthy particle physics discussion.
For sales-related blogs, a picture really could be worth a thousand words. Images of merchandise or new lines should be used as the centerpiece of new uploads, with the accompanying text complementing rather than distracting from the photos. Images should be hyperlinked to any ecommerce sites, making it easy for prospective customers to locate the items online, and products should either be photographed against a plain background or in use within a real-life scenario.
What If My Blog Isn’t An Ecommerce Website?
For non-sales blog content, eye-catching images can persuade readers to settle in and read an entire article, rather than just skimming the headline or opening paragraph. Photos will also enhance any social media links that are added, providing a more dynamic status update than two lines of text. It’s important to note that images can play a role in a blog’s SEO ranking, if alt tags and descriptions are attached to each photo. Without cutting corners, the judicious use of images can even enable a blog to look substantial with less written content – often the most time-consuming aspect of production.
Having said all that, it’s also important to use images sparingly. Every kilobyte of data that needs to be downloaded will increase the time it takes for a blog to display, and Google’s search engine algorithms now penalize slow-loading sites. Image compression can help, but resizing photos prior to uploading them is a more efficient solution. The world’s 2.5 billion camera phones are taking images in ever-increasingly high resolution, and rescaling these for web purposes is an essential step that can be easily undertaken using free photo editing software. A little time spent learning how to crop and lighten will pay dividends if it helps to accomplish greater blog engagement.