Why It Matters To Have Images On Your Blog
Your blog helps you to expand your business, attract more clients and maintain relationships with your current customers. Many of your most qualified leads, whether you’ve identified them or not, will check out your blog at some stage.
As you add new content to your blog it’s important to understand which elements are important factors that make your blog stand out to your audience.
You want a blog that’s “sticky”. This means it brings people back, makes people recommend it to others, and is a destination for anyone interested in your niche. The way you do that is to create great content with eye catching images on your blog.
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Power Up Your Business With Images On Your Blog
The saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” is no truer than it is in blog posts. These days, a webpage or blog post doesn’t really look complete without a supporting image. It gives the visitor to that page a quick and easy glance at what the content will be about.
In journalism, they refer to the 100-70-50-30-10 rule. This means 100% of readers will look at the headlines and the pictures. Based on what they see, 70% of them will read the first paragraph of the article, 50% the second, 30% the third, and 10% the fourth. So, with eye-catching images on your blog it helps to grab their attention right from the outset.
Images Break Up the Space
Content without images can be very boring on the eye. Looking at line after line of text just gets too much after a while. If you’re writing a blog post about ‘how to do something’, it always helps to show some sort of image along with the ‘how to post’ so that your readers can visually see how to do it as well as keep on reading.
Images Help With Understanding
As in the example above of a ‘how to post’, an image on any post can help the reader understand what you’re talking about more. If the image relates to the blog post, it will put your reader in the right mood. For instance, if you want your reader to feel happy, post a happy picture in relation to the content. If you want them to think about money, put an image that relates to money.
Get More Likes and Shares on Social Media
People are very visual, and if you use interesting images on your blog, your readers are much more likely to share them on social media. The share also looks better because it catches the eye and isn’t just a bunch of text on the status. You can drive traffic to your back to your blog using a simple Image Sharer. This is simple way for your readers to automatically share the images on your blog which link back to you, driving you viral traffic!
Pinterest, for example, is dominated by images (or pins) that are pinned to a virtual pin board. It’s the #2 referrer of traffic to websites on the entire internet, not just compared to its social media counterparts. It currently has over 150 milion active monthly users and 87% of users have purchased a product because of Pinterest.
Facebook also encourages images. In fact, you must have an image to participate in their ad network. Instagram, and Tumblr also work well with attractive images.
How To Use Images In Blog Posts
Images on your blog will help with your search engine optimization (SEO). Although the search engines cannot ‘read’ images, they can read the descriptions that you give them. An ‘alt image tag’ are the words that you use to describe your image. It’s also what your website visitor reads when they move their cursor over an image on your website.
Your image descriptions are a great place to insert your keywords. Don’t just use the alt tag to say ‘image’ or ‘photo’. You might say something with a keyword such as ‘social media expert sitting at a desk’ as the alt image tag instead of just a one word boring tag. Incidentally, this makes your blog enjoyable for people who are blind and use readers too.
Where To Find Images For Your Blog
Choosing images for your blog posts, as well as your information products will increase your chances of success many times over. Finding images for your blog is easy. However, you do need to ensure that you have the rights to use them. For example, you can’t just start using celebrity images on blogs that you’ve found on a Google search. There are plenty of website that provide free blog photos.These are images that you can use without any copyright infringement.
Blog Image Best Practices
Include at least one relevant image in each post. If you’re using WordPress, be sure to use that same image also as a featured image for that post so that same image shows up in the recently published blog post listing.
If you include a link with the images on your blog, check that it takes the visitor to the right place. Are your photos up-to-date? Every time you add new content to your blog, you have a new chance to get the search engines’ attention. Replace old photos if they look ‘blah’ and dull. Make sure you add a keyword description of a photo to its alt tag and include a caption. This not only helps search engine rankings, but it also gives a textual description of your picture.
Free Checklist: 21 Days To A Better Blog
Blogging remains a marketing method that costs very little to set up and people from all walks of life have created making money blogs. To avoid your blog becoming tired and boring, there are some specific ways you can build your blog audience into loyal followers and customers. Adding images on your blog is just one way. To learn more ways to improve your blog, download my free checklist, 21 Days To A Better Blog. Discover 21 different one-a-day tasks and activities for getting more traffic, more prospects, more customers and more sales.