Blogging has been around the Worldwide Web for more than a decade. It started as a simple online personal journal where the author writes his/her personal experiences and hobbies, or opinions. But as the years’ pass and technology evolve, blogging purposes widened.
Now blogging is also a great way to share valuable information and spread awareness. For these reasons, entrepreneurs make blogging one of their top strategies in promoting their business.
But just like with any other things in business, you need to come up with an effective strategy for your blog to achieve maximum visibility and ROI. There are tons of effective strategies, but the one strategy that’s always been on top of every marketer’s list is sharing image-based content.
Everybody loves great and engaging images! Memes, infographics, and GIFs are just some of the images people commonly shared on their social media accounts. That is the simplest reason why image-based content becomes effective in targeting the right audience and building a solid community.
But aside from that, the most important reasons why including great images are necessary for your blog to succeed are the following:
Top 5 reasons why great images are vital for successful blogging
1) Aesthetically pleasing posts
Appearance is always the first thing people notice in a blog post. This will be their primary basis whether to stay or not on your blog.
So to ensure that your audience will stay on your blog longer, you have to create unique and engaging content. And you can deliver that by including great and relevant images on your blog post.
A blog post that has an image included on it is proven to receive more clicks, views, and shares because it looks more appealing and inviting.
Though, pure text-based content is still an effective method; but if your blog post includes thousands of words, it’s best for you to include images on it to lessen the word count and, at the same time, make it livelier.
2) Make it easier to understand complex information
One of the reasons people search online is to be informed. So in sharing your expertise, you have to make it as simple as possible. This is for your audience to easily understand it.
But there are times that mentioning technical terminologies or information on your content is unavoidable. If this happens, you have to explain it clearly to your audience.
Including an image is an effective way to explain your content clearly. For example, your offered product is a mobile application; if you’re informing your audience on how to use it properly, instead of explaining it through text just share an image like infographics.
Or if you plan to share bugs fixes, you have to share individual images of all the errors accompanied by an image on how to troubleshoot it.
You may find this technique simple and too basic. But for the audience, this is very helpful.
3) Better exposure in social media
One of the great benefits of including an image on blogs is having a better exposure in social media.
Since people appreciate images more than text-based content, social media make images as the major player of their platform. This is to ensure that their users will remain to use their platform.
But, of course, not all images are being accepted. As a general rule of thumb, all images that you’ll share must be original; especially if you owned a business or promoting a brand. This is for your audience to know the real appearance of your brand and distinguish its difference from your competitors.
But if you don’t have the time to create an original image, you can use images from free stock websites. Just make sure to add a personal touch on it to assure that your message is clear and easy-to-understand.
4) A more professional look of your posts
Including an image to your blog posts has tons of benefits. But the most distinct benefit of it is it makes your blog posts look more professional.
This is important for business owners because if their audience sees their company as professionals, they will take them seriously and eventually trust all of their products/services offered.
You can deliver this by skillfully illustrate the core message of your brand, or backed up your information with fact-check graphs or diagrams. The more accurate you include on your blog post, the more your audience will trust your brand.
Creating this is not an easy task and requires a lot of time. If you don’t have the time, you can always invest in a good graphic designer.
5) Encourage sharing
Social media is all about communication.
Images are social media’s king of all content.
Properly combining those two statements on your marketing strategy will give you a higher chance of getting views and likes. But getting views and likes don’t always guarantee to share as well.
If you want to ensure that your content will be shared you have to include a clear call-to-action statement on your images. These call-to-actions can contain any of the following:
- A promo code for your incoming sale;
- A direct link to your brand’s website;
- An invitation to join a contest or a raffle;
- Or, the latest updates about your products or company.
If having call-to-action statements don’t fit on your blog post, you can still encourage sharing by creating an image that’s entertaining and informative.
Blogging is just like cooking, you have to combine all the right ingredients for it to pass your audience taste. It just happens that including an image is one of blogging best ingredients.
You’ll never have a problem in coming up with an idea because images are very flexible. You can use it to create funny memes, educational infographics or a simple GIF to express your emotions or reaction to a certain topic.
Just always remember that in using images it should always be relevant to your content, original and added great value to your audience’s life and/or career.
Hi, I’m George. I have been a camera enthusiast from 2008. Cameraseals is my personal blog where I share most of my interests and experiences from using cameras. You will find helpful topics even if you’re a beginner or long-time user.
Hi, Mr. George, I have a question related to your article, my question is, should we write about the image description beside just write our keywords on images alt and image title? I’m using yoast-seo as my preferrences and it said we just need to make sure that images alt contain the focus keywords, what’s your opinion about this? Thank you before for sharing
Great post and a good reminder to keep thinking about all the ways to engage a reader.
Videos are another great option.
Cheers!
George your all the five points are great and instead of all these what I think that Images provides good SEO benefits too.
Using multiple and relevant images in blog posts increases user engagement and also search engine tends to rank higher such posts.
How images are important can be understood by a chinese proverb i.e. “One Picture Worth Ten Thousand Words”.
And George you have emphasized this proverb according to today’s internet era.
Hi
George,
You have well explained the importance of images for blog posts. Images brings life to your blog post and make things easy to understand. By including relevant images on your blog post you can provide more value to your readers and engage them for a longer time. There are many benefits of including images to blog posts.
Thanks for sharing this informative post with us.
Best wishes,
Praveen
Nice one, George.
Beyond making one’s blog look professional, adding an image makes it easier to rank high on search engine. Of course, this can only happen if you rename the image to rhyme with the blog title before uploading it.
For me, I use at least 2 images for articles beyond 600 words and one image for article below 600 hundred words.
Thanks for your input on Sue’s blog.
Emenike
Hi George, completely agree with your comments. Images make so much difference to a blog.
Do you have any tips for file size and resolution using jpegs. I use the save for web feature in Adobe Photoshop but I’m never sure what file size I should be aiming for.
Hey George,
I use a only a couple of images in my every blog post. One as a featured image and the other one as the content demands. I also create some images myself rather than downloading them from Google. But after reading this post, I will making more use of them. I am also interested in creating infographics. Any insight on how we can use them or create them?
Thanks
Vineet Saxena
Hi George, completely agree with your comments. Images make so much difference to a blog.
Do you have any tips for file size and resolution using jpegs? I use the save for web feature in Adobe Photoshop but I’m never sure what file size I should be aiming for.
Hi George,
These blogging tips are really crucial. In fact, images are the main attraction of any post.
I would also like to add value of Infographics here. It is proved that Infographics attract more visitors.
If we copy image from other sites should we need to add link of the image source or just give credits by words in text format?
Hi George,
Thanks you so much for sharing this tips. We realised the visitor dwell time have increased tremendously after i added the images of our works in the post.
Furthermore, certain blog post been ranking for medium competitive keywords too ! it really amazing how the images benefit me on this.
Thanks you,
Jeff
Hi George,
These blogging tips are really good. Thank you for sharing this article.
You have well explained the things in your post in quite in a cool and informative way. Thank you for sharing. It really helped me out to use the better and correct image or infographic for our blog post. Although I have been writing the blog posts for my website for quite a long time along with the necessary stuff like GIFs or memes but how to use them correctly in well mannered, I just found here through some tips.
such a great article thanks for sharing
Hi Sue!
Those were some great pointers on how to make your blogging more engaging, thank you for your expert insight in this particular topic, immensely helped me understand more about blogging!
You are so welcome, Jenny!
Sue
Hi George,
This article is very useful in my website, I never use an image on my website, after reading your article I will use it, thanks so much 🙂
Wonderful blog & amazing 5 points you have given.Indeed! great Image is always vital for only only in blogging but also in social media. Thank you for sharing these amazing points.
Hi George,
Images are really important for blog posts.
It increases the aesthetic look of a post.
It breaks post content which makes a post enjoyable to read.
It helps a post in terms of SEO.
So, we can say that having images in a post is a must.
This article is very helpfull.
i have read this article. you are doing great….
keep it up….
thank you…
Hlo George,
So useful and informative article you have shared. I really like this post . Thanks for sharing this article with us.
Images are the biggest source to attract visitors and you have told us the best tips ever to create a stunning image for the blog article or social media. Thanks a lot.
Hello Mr.George,
You have explained the usage of images in a creative manner. Using images can help your article rank faster and makes the article more interesting.
Good to read.
Hello George, Thanks for the article! Nicely descried and easy to understand article! Will help me a lot!
Excellent way of describing, and pleasant post to obtain information concerning my presentation focus,
which i am going to deliver in college.
Hi
It was a good read, you have shared some points that I was wondering about.
Thanks!
I blog often and I truly thank you for your information. This great article has truly peaked my interest.
I’m going to take a note of your site and keep checking for new details about once per week.
I subscribed to your RSS feed too.