This week's topic: Graphics
Welcome back for another installment of our blog audit challenge. I hope this challenge is helping you learn more about blogging, and helping you improve your own book blogs. This week we're focusing on graphics.
Blogging is not just about plain written text on a page. A good blog will have a combination of written text, images, and other multimedia content. As a minimum all blog posts should have at least one image in them.
Why should blog posts include images?
Good question.
1) Because it makes the blog post more visually appealing.
2) Image search engine traffic.
3) More social shares.
4) Helps readers remember the post.
5) A picture is worth a thousand words.
Now let's take a closer look at each of these:
Visually appealing
Images help break up the text and add interest to the article.
"Related posts" and "popular posts" in the side bar will use an image from the post as a thumbnail image and can help increase your CTR and decrease your bounce rate.
Search engine traffic
Make sure you use Alt text and add a description to your images and you can grab traffic from image search engines. Don't forget to include your keywords!
Social shares
Image do well on social media. People like to share content especially when it makes their newsfeed look pretty and eye catching. Whether it's Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or LinkedIn, images stand out and are more often shared. Then there's image based social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest that can drive huge amounts of traffic to your site.
I recommend using an add-on like Sumo to make image sharing via social media super easy for your readers. I've been using it for a while now and love it.
Make it memorable
Images help people see the things we're talking about. In the case of tutorial posts, including screenshots can really help get your message across. To be even more memorable, add branding to your images. A quality, well branded image will make your article stick in the readers mind much better than a plain text post would.
A picture is worth a thousand words
The right image can quickly convey the message of your post. On a book blog, for example, images of books and/or people reading will automatically make it clear about the content of the website.
You may also want to try including infographics in your blog posts. A visual representation of the highlights from your post can be helpful to readers (especially those that don't have much time to read longer posts).
There are loads of sites online where you can create professional looking images for you blog posts free of charge. My personal favourite is Canva, but there are loads of others.
This week's task:
- Make sure every blog post has at least one image.
- Update older posts so that all blog posts have consistent branding.
Missed a post? Here's a round up of what we've covered so far:
Blog Audit
Blog Audit Challenge
bloggers
blogging
blogging advice
blogging tips
blogs
book blog
book blogger
book bloggers
book blogging
canva
graphic design
graphics
Jo Linsdell
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2 comments
Fab tips Jo. Branding images is a great idea thank you!
ReplyDeleteGlad you liked it Kim. Branding is so important. Using branded graphics is an easy way to strengthen your brand as it makes you more recognizable across the board. It also helps to make you look more professional.
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