As the popular saying goes: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Doubly, adding a picture to a story with a thousand words comes with its own unique set of advantages. Below are some useful tips on how to best utilize photos in your blog while also further attracting readership to the site.
We live in a visual age where the phrase “print is dead” has been thrown around with some degree of accuracy. Attention spans are shorter and online viewers are less inclined to read blocks and blocks of text without any visual aid. It’s also worth noting that using the right photo can further entice visitors to your blog to click on and read posts relevant to them. For example, someone perusing recent posts might miss the fact that an article is geared toward them based solely off the title, but the appropriate image could catch their eye and lead to them digging deeper and reading the post.
As hinted at above, relevance and appropriateness are key when it comes to implementing photos in your blog posts. For example, if you write a geo-specific story on Southern California and use an image that features snow-covered trees, it could take the reader out of the story as it is obvious the stock image has nothing to do with SoCal.
Another example: say you write a story about the condo market in your area but the image you use clearly features a single-family house. Anyone who knows the difference between a home and a condo (which is everyone) will immediately be turned off by the post and you as the author will lose credibility for not only the post but the entire blog.
It can be challenging, especially if you use a stock image site, to find the perfect photo for certain blog posts. However, if you do the proper legwork you will see that there really is a photo for every story. Try focusing on very specific aspects of the story. For example, if you write about a new restaurant opening in the River North neighborhood of Chicago, but don’t want to just plaster a generic photo of the Windy City’s skyline on the post, focus on the restaurant aspect and find a generic picture of a couple sitting down to a nice meal. It could be in Chicago, but there is nothing that explicitly implies that it’s not in Chicago, either.
Photos for your blog posts are always a good idea, but not utilizing them properly can quickly turn it into a bad idea. Following the aforementioned tips will lend credibility to your blog and your readers will appreciate that in the short- and long-term.
